Unfairness

Update: I'm a little late to this, my home Internet is buggy, but thank you M. Bouffant at Crooks & Liars for including this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up!

I've got a little too much rage in me to discuss the judge's ruling granting trump his delay-tactic Special Master bullshit, so I'll quote extensively from Emptywheel who goes into better legal detail than I can:

As noted yesterday, Judge Aileen Cannon enjoined the government from conducting a criminal investigation into violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction because around 4.5% — possibly as little as .5% — of the materials seized from Trump in 27 boxes amount to things more personal than MAGA hats and press clippings.

Her logic rests on a series of false claims about what amounts to being owned...

Cannon starts her decision on whether to appoint a Special Master not on the privilege questions, but on Richey, which is how one decides whether someone should get their property back. In her analysis of the second prong of Richey, she decides (virtually all of this entails Cannon doing things Trump’s attorneys did not do) that Trump does have a property interest in this material. She points to medical and tax records the likes of which she believes people should be able to steal from Ashely Biden with impunity and says those — a tiny fraction of the whole — gives Trump standing under Richey...

This is why I laid out how small a percentage of the seized records this involves. On August 8, the government seized 11,282 stolen government records, of which 103 are marked as classified, 1,673 press clippings, and around 64 “sets of material” that might be privileged. 

Those 64 sets of material have not been shared with the investigative team. They’ve been segregated by the privilege team. Cannon doesn’t even claim Trump owns them. He may not! They may be White House Counsel documents about the Mazars challenge or White House physician documents about Trump’s COVID treatment. We don’t know whether they do or not because they are being protected, for Trump’s sake.

But the claim that this personal information equates to a property interest is one of three things that Cannon cites to substantiate her claim that something among this vast swath of stolen documents is owned by Donald Trump...

That would be crazy enough. But to ensure she’d even get to this ruling, Cannon already refused to let DOJ share all this, the 520 pages of potentially privileged material and the tax and medical records therein. The filter team lawyers, Benjamin Hawk, asked to do so last Thursday. But Cannon told him no, because she wanted to do all this “holistically”...

So the only reason DOJ still has exclusive possession of the materials on which she hangs her Richey analysis is because she, Aileen Cannon, prohibited DOJ from sharing it, and she uses DOJ’s possession of it to prevent the government from investigating the thousands of government documents Trump stole.

As for the rest, she makes stuff up. As noted, she claims that in the government’s response they admitted that, “The Government also has acknowledged that it seized some “[p]ersonal effects without evidentiary value.” She returns to this citation several times to claim that the government has acknowledged it seized stuff it should not have. Tell me if you can find that acknowledgment in the passage she cites...

Go ahead and visit her website and leave a comment if you can find that acknowledgement. I've looked and I'm not seeing it.

Look at what she did!!! First, she took a subjunctive statement — that if the FBI were to find personal items without evidentiary value (like his passports, which they already returned, of which she makes no mention, because it would prove the government is right) — and outright lied and claimed it was a concession they had found such things. The reason she doesn’t mention the passports, by the way, is because the government said, “The location of the passports is relevant evidence in an investigation of unauthorized retention and mishandling of national defense information.” So even there, they asserted an investigative interest. But in a passage where the government states, outright, that the Plaintiff has not established the government has seized anything not covered by the warrant, Aileen Cannon simply invents a concession that says they took stuff that is unnecessary to the investigation. Makes it up!

And yet she uses it as part of her “proof” that there are personal belongings among the 11,000 stolen documents. And she invented it out of thin air...

To a legal expert like Emptywheel, this is a nightmare of invented interpretations of law. To a layman like myself, this is yet again a legal system bending over backwards to give undue and arguably illegal protections to a rich white man screaming about "fairness."

It's been noted before how trump's world-view is defined by "fairness." But not fairness as we'd define it as equal between others: trump operates on his belief that he should be accorded special - not equal treatment - when it came to running for the Presidency back in 2016. It's the same way he demanded being treated "fairly" by all the judges he had to approach to deal with his bankruptcy and fraud cases. He would scream "I'm not being treated fair!" and the media would take his complaints at face value than as the whining 5-year-old con artist trying to bluff his way out of a legal jam.

It has led to the ongoing nightmare of failure by our legal system to ever hold trump truly accountable for the sins he's committed for over 40 years. What's "unfair" for him has been the way our courts and cops have handled criminal subjects all along, but he gets the advantages of wealth - hiring lawyers and press agents to argue his case in both the courtroom and the public forum - and cultural privilege granted to rich white men, over and over again. Our state DAs and federal prosecutors should have gone after trump for long-whispered reports of fraud and money laundering as early as the 1990s.

It does not help that due to trump's 4-year-reign of error in the White House he gained the ability to pack the federal courts with judges like Cannon who either share the Far Right conservative mindset of "screwing the libs" or else owe trump the debt of giving him favorable "fair" treatment they would not give any other petitioner before their bench. By any ethical measure, Cannon should have recused herself from this matter, especially as trump was insisting on legal defenses that had no previous case history to stand on and was clearly looking for a friendly judge who owed him this.

And so now we stand as a nation on the edge of a legal criminal matter - one involving loss of classified documents on a scale of espionage we haven't seen since Ames, Hanssen, or the Rosenbergs! - coping with the real-world unfairness of a legal system that has rolled over far too many times for a known con-artist vulgarian in trump.

Gods help us.