FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

[Rick Plant]

DOJ wins at appeals court over Trump judge's controversial ruling

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit stayed a controversial ruling by a Florida district court judge that had effectively blocked the Justice Department and national security agencies from reviewing highly classified documents seized by the FBI at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

That order, by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, had found that the former president had a compelling interest to those documents not being accessed by the executive branch until a special master had reviewed them for privilege, including executive privilege on behalf of Trump — even though no court has ever ruled former presidents have such privilege or that this privilege outweighs the U.S. government's interest in preventing breaches of classified information.

In the 11th Circuit order obtained by POLITICO, a panel of three judges — including two who were also appointed by Trump — put that order on hold, suggesting that the Justice Department is likely to prevail against Trump on the merits.

According to the ruling, Trump "has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents."

Other parts of Cannon's ruling, including that appointing the special master, were left in place, as the Justice Department did not object to those measures.

This comes one day after the special master Cannon appointed, Senior Judge Raymond Dearie, harshly grilled Trump's attorneys in his first hearing on the classified documents, demanding that they take a position on the former president's repeated public claims that he had retroactively declassified that information — noting that the DOJ has already provided "prima facie" evidence the documents should in fact be presumed classified.

https://www.rawstory.com/11th-circuit-trump-doj/



"Judge Cannon" completely bungled her job — and got rightly smacked down: Former prosecutor



On MSNBC Wednesday, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman broke down the new Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling placing a stay on right-wing Judge Aileen Cannon's order that effectively prohibited the Justice Department from investigating the classified documents former President Donald Trump had stashed at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

The decision, Litman argued, was a victory for justice, and a rebuke of Cannon's poor legal analysis.

"This ruling just came out, the three-judge panel — we should, say two of them, those judges appointed by Donald Trump," said anchor Chris Hayes. "All three finding that for the government, give us a rundown of what they said?"

"You know, couldn't be more definitive," said Litman. "There is a matter-of-fact tone to it. You read it, and really what comes through is that this is so obvious. It's like waking from a nightmare. We have people who looked at these other opinions by Judge Cannon, trying to explain that these were not in some subtle way arguably right. They were completely off the reservation. And you read these 27 pages — it is a per curiam by the way, the three judges decide to show their unity being together. They almost surely have been writing it over the course of the week. So clear was it what she did was wrong."

"They just settle down and rebuke everything she said," continued Litman. "'We cannot discern' — that's not what you want to hear in the court of appeal — 'we cannot discern a reason why there is a possessory interest.' Any injury for having to be subject of a criminal investigation, like anyone else. She had given him special treatment. Forget about it. One after the other, very methodical."

"I am dramatic. But when you of course take a step back and see how comprehensive it is, it just completely rebukes everything she did," added Litman. "You know? It's some restoration of faith after a truly heart-stoppingly bad set of opinions from her. What they get, by the way, is exactly what she refused to give them in her second opinion. They now have the hundred classified documents. They have taken other things off the table. It argues poorly for her continued mischief in the case."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Watch: Trump tells Sean Hannity he could declassify documents with his mind



Donald Trump on Wednesday argued that a president of the United States can declassify documents without speaking or writing a single word.

Trump, fresh off a major defeat in the Mar-a-Lago documents case before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, was interviewed on Fox News by Sean Hannity.

"You have said on Truth Social, a number of times, you did declassify," Hannity said.

"I did declassify," Trump claimed, even though his attorneys have not made that argument in courtrooms in Florida, New York, or Georgia.

"What was your process to declassify?" Hannity asked.

"There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it," Trump replied. "You know, there's different people, say different things."

"If you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, 'it's declassified' — even by thinking about it," Trump claimed.

Whether or not the documents were declassified is irrelevant to the three crimes the FBI said it was investigating in its search warrant application. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday, "declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Trump's telepathic declassification defense met with scorn and derision by legal scholars



Legal experts on Wednesday largely disagreed with Donald Trump's Fox News argument that he had the ability to declassify documents with his mind.

"There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it. You know, there's different people, say different things," Trump told Sean Hannity. "If you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, 'it's declassified' — even by thinking about it."

Attorney and former FBI Agent Asha Rangappa joked, "he’s actually invoking the Secret Telepathic Unilateral Preemptive Irreversible Declassification (S.T.U.P.I.D.) defense."

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote, "that's beyond wrong, it's insane."

On MSNBC, anchor Lawrence O'Donnell played a clip of the interview and asked national security lawyer Bradley Moss for analysis.

"Yeah, I saw that clip right before I came on and I tried not to burst out laughing," Moss replied.

Moss noticed that judges ruled three times during the Trump administration that the declassification process must occur.

"If he is sitting there and thinking in his mind 'hey, I decided I'm going to declassify the secrets about Iran tonight,' the NSA needs to know if there was their signals intelligence or CIA needs to know," Moss explained. "You can just willy-nilly do it and that's his big problem."

"That's why there is no declaration in the civil case proving he declassified anything," Moss said. "Because he's got nothing, zero, zippo, zilch, nada."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

An appeals court rules the DOJ can regain access to documents seized from Mar-a-Lago
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/21/1124431613/appeals-court-justice-mar-a-lago

[Rick Plant]

Trump-appointed judge backtracks on her previous ruling after 11th Circuit delivers stinging rebuke



Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon backtracked on previous aspects of her ruling in favor of former President Donald Trump on Thursday, just hours after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a stinging rebuke that overturned her decision to block the government from using top secret documents as part of its investigation.

In a new filing flagged by Politico's Kyle Cheney, Cannon amended her previous order to state that the seized material subject to a special master review no longer includes the "approximately one-hundred documents bearing classification markings."

The 11th Circuit, a three-judge panel that consists of two Trump appointees, criticized arguments made by the former president's lawyers, who wanted the DOJ to be forced to stop its probe into Trump's decision to allegedly keep top secret government documents stashed at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

In their ruling, the judges noted that Trump "has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents."

Cannon's original ruling was widely criticized by many legal experts, who said that the United States Department of Justice was likely to win an appeal at the 11th Circuit.

https://www.rawstory.com/aileen-cannon-2658324050/

[Rick Plant]

Trump's path to stall documents probe narrows after legal setbacks



(Reuters) -Donald Trump's bid to impede a criminal investigation into his possession of documents taken from the White House has begun to unravel, legal experts said, after courtroom setbacks including doubts expressed by judges about the former U.S. president's claim that he declassified records seized at his Florida home.

Trump has experienced disappointments on multiple fronts this week as his lawyers try to slow down the Justice Department investigation that kicked into high gear with an Aug. 8 court-approved search of his Mar-a-Lago residence in which FBI agents found 11,000 documents including about 100 marked as classified.

A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled that federal investigators could immediately resume examining the classified records, reversing Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's decision to wall off these documents while an independent arbiter assesses whether any should be withheld as privileged.

"Cannon's ruling is so far out of the norm, and the 11th Circuit did such a good job of thoroughly dismantling her opinion," said Jonathan Shaub, a former attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who now teaches law at the University of Kentucky.

Trump may appeal the 11th Circuit's ruling to the Supreme Court, but experts doubted the justices would agree to hear it. The 11th Circuit's panel included two judges appointed by Trump.

At issue in the investigation - one of several legal woes entangling Trump as he considers another run for the presidency in 2024 - is whether he broke federal laws preventing the destruction or concealment of government records and the unauthorized possession of national defense information. The Justice Department is also looking into whether Trump unlawfully tried to obstruct the investigation.

Trump has not been charged with any crime and the mere existence of an investigation does not mean he will be.

As part of Trump's counterattack against the investigation, he has made public claims that he personally declassified the seized records.

"If you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking it," Trump told Fox News on Wednesday. "You're sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you're sending it, and there doesn't have to be a process."

Trump's lawyers, however, have stopped short of stating in court that he declassified the documents, though they have not conceded that they are classified.

The 11th Circuit called Trump's declassification argument a "red herring." The three statutes underpinning the FBI's search warrant at Mar-a-Lago make it a crime to mishandle government records, regardless of their classification status. The 11th Circuit also said it could not discern why Trump would have "an individual interest in or need" for any of the documents marked as classified.

Trump's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

'REAL EVIDENCE'

To make matters worse for Trump, Judge Raymond Dearie - the arbiter, or special master, named by Cannon to vet the seized documents - asked Trump's lawyers on Tuesday why he should not consider records marked classified as genuinely classified. Dearie pressed Trump's lawyers to make clear whether they plan to assert that the records had been declassified as Trump claims.

Trump's lawyers proposed Dearie to serve as special master.

"Unless Trump can come up with real evidence saying he went through some kind of declassification procedure and declassified this stuff, there's no way he can prevail on this, and if he had that evidence his lawyers would have presented it," said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University.

Even as he has stated that he declassified the records, Trump also has publicly suggested that the FBI planted them at Mar-a-Lago. Dearie on Thursday asked Trump's lawyers to provide any evidence backing this up.

David Laufman, the Justice Department's former head of counterintelligence, said Trump's comments on Fox News were highly incriminating.

"Prosecutors must lick their chops every time Trump makes a public statement that is equivalent to making evidentiary admissions, like talking about sending documents marked classified down to Mar-a-Lago because, according to his account, he thought about declassifying them," Laufman said.

"It was a great day for the rule of law," Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor and current law professor at the University of Michigan, said of the 11th Circuit's ruling. "It says that the law matters more than anyone's loyalty to a particular person."

© Reuters

[Joe Elliott]

Criminal Donald now claims he had the power to declassify documents just “by thinking about it.” No really, he said this. Mind control as a criminal defense. What’s left of his psyche is shattering under the pressure. He knows it’s all over for him.

If a President can toss out an election by just thinking it was corrupt, why can't he declassify documents by just thinking they should be declassified?

[Rick Plant]

Appeals court rules DOJ can regain access to sensitive documents seized in Trump search

Watch:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-classified-documents-justice-department-11th-circuit-court-of-appeals-stay/