When former President Donald Trump summoned up years of bubbling resentment and sued Hillary Clinton and everyone else involved in Russiagate earlier this year, he naturally filed his lawsuit in South Florida—home to his oceanside estate.
And yet, when his attorneys formally filed the paperwork, they selected a tiny courthouse in the sprawling federal court district’s furthest northeast corner—a satellite location that’s 70 miles from Mar-a-Lago. They ignored the West Palm Beach federal courthouse that’s a 12-minute drive away.
Trump’s legal team, it seemed, was specifically seeking out a particular federal judge: one he appointed as president.
The tactic failed, and Trump instead got a Clinton-era judge whom he promptly tried to disqualify for alleged bias. U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks called him out in a snarky footnote.
“I note that Plaintiff filed this lawsuit in the Fort Pierce division of this District, where only one federal judge sits: Judge Aileen Cannon, who Plaintiff appointed in 2020. Despite the odds, this case landed with me instead. And when Plaintiff is a litigant before a judge that he himself appointed, he does not tend to advance these same sorts of bias concerns,” Middlebrooks wrote in April.
Months later, Trump is once again suing in the Southern District of Florida, this time seeking to hamper the FBI investigation into the way he kept hundreds of classified records at Mar-a-Lago. Except this time, he got Cannon.
The strategy is already paying off.
On Monday afternoon, Cannon single-handedly hit the brakes on the most politically sensitive and consequential FBI investigation ever undertaken. Convinced by Team Trump’s legal arguments that the routine Justice Department methods for carefully handling seized documents aren’t good enough when investigating this particular former president, she ordered that a “special master” be tasked with playing referee to dictate what happens with classified documents that are evidence of a crime.
“The investigation and treatment of a former president is of unique interest to the general public, and the country is served best by an orderly process that promotes the interest and perception of fairness,” she wrote in her order.
As they did last month at Mar-a-Lago, the feds typically rely on a so-called “filter team” to separate constitutionally protected communications between a suspect and their lawyer from evidence that goes to the actual investigators working on the criminal case. But Cannon ordered the appointment of a “special master”—from a list of candidates who are amenable to both the DOJ and Trump—to further oversee the handling of those documents. The fact that Trump may have a say is a notable victory rarely granted to someone accused of crimes as serious as violations of the Espionage Act.
Cannon held back on deciding whether the FBI should return Trump’s personal items—like accounting documents, medical records, and tax-related correspondence—even though the DOJ has indicated that their placement next to some of the nation’s most highly classified secrets officially makes them evidence of Trump’s criminal recklessness that could be shown at a future trial.
Her ruling was widely criticized by former prosecutors and legal scholars on Monday over the way it awkwardly lent credence to the idea that an ex-president can somehow assert “executive privilege” over government documents, even if federal law enforcement agencies operating with the tacit approval of a current president are acting in their capacity as the current executive branch.
“This special master opinion is so bad it’s hard to know where to begin… her analysis of standing is terrible. Trump wouldn’t own these docs anyway, so why does he get a Master over them?” tweeted Neal Katyal, a national security law professor who was previously the nation’s top lawyer as the federal government’s solicitor general.
Katyal also…
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