Charles Pierce: Nobody Should Entertain Trump's Bid to Appoint a Special Master, And Yet...

[Nevilledog]

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Charles P. Pierce
@CharlesPPierce
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People keep telling me not to worry about the fact that a Trump-appointed judge in Florida seems to be taking a part of the former president*’s shabby defense strategy far more seriously than its arguments warrant. I am not listening to them.

esquire.com
Nobody Should Entertain Trump's Bid to Appoint a Special Master, And Yet...
That it's getting a hearing at all makes me itch behind the knees.
11:42 AM · Aug 29, 2022

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a41020639/special-master-donald-trump/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/yWUi3


People keep telling me not to worry about the fact that a Trump-appointed and Rick Scott-endorsed judge in Florida seems to be taking a part of the former president*’s shabby defense strategy far more seriously than its arguments warrant. From the Washington Post:

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s two-page order issued on Saturday appeared unusual in that the judge has not yet heard arguments from the Justice Department, said former federal prosecutors and legal analysts on Sunday. Cannon, 41, whom Trump appointed to the bench in the Southern District of Florida in 2020, has also given federal officials until Tuesday to provide the court with a more detailed list of items the FBI had removed from Trump’s Florida estate on Aug. 8. She asked the government to give a status report of its own review of the materials and set a Thursday court hearing in West Palm Beach, Fla. That location is about an hour away from the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., where she typically hears cases.

Yes, people tell me not to worry about this. I am not listening to them.

At this moment, anything that throws sand in the gears of the investigation into the Pool Shed Papers is to the advantage of the former president*. And this has been his strategy toward legal accountability in both his political and business careers. Commit the act, stiff the tradesmen, pay off the porn stars—and then distract and delay the legal processes until either those processes exhaust themselves or the plaintiffs/government decide the game is not worth the candle.

Anything that smacks of this M.O. sets off my weary Trumpian alarm. Over the past several years, I have found this to be the only sensible way to proceed. His destruction is always obvious and predictable, and it always occurs in the bright light of day.

Anything that blunts the gathering momentum of any of the investigations works against them. For several weeks now, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has been publicly flailing. The increasingly incoherent dispatches. The never-ending roundelay of obscure, untalented lawyers. Everything had a fine sheen of flop-sweat on it. This move by the judge is a very effective countermeasure to all that. It smacks of the preemptive spin that Bill Barr used to defang the Mueller Report in the public mind. And, as Mueller’s former chief counsel Andrew Weissman told the Post, its legality is dubious at best.

He said that while special masters have been assigned in civil cases to review questions of attorney-client privilege, it is virtually unheard of for such a figure to be asked to assess executive privilege claims — particularly given that Trump is no longer president and appears to have no standing for such a claim. “DOJ has a lot of work to do in terms of setting out not just a particular position on a special master but elucidating [Cannon] on issues about attorney-client privilege and executive privilege,” Weissmann said.

On Monday, the DOJ told the judge that it already had completed its review of the documents and found only a small number of them involved attorney-client privilege. This, of course, undercuts the idea of a special master since the privilege questions are central to the Trump team’s demand for one. If, in the face of this, the judge orders one installed anyway, then we would be understandably concerned that a fix was in. There’s a hearing on the matter on Thursday, so if it’s OK with everyone else, I’m going to worry for a while longer.

*The end*

[Irish_Dem]

1. People who underestimate Trump are very foolish.

Trump's idiot buffoon act is just an act.

He is one of the most dangerous men in the world.
And typically gets away with everything.

[intrepidity]

2. knr nt