A federal judge on Thursday heard arguments about whether or not to appoint an outside legal expert, a special master, to look over documents that were seized by the FBI last month during a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate. So what was the decision? Well….there wasn’t one.
According to Newsmax, Trump’s legal team has made the argument that appointing a special master is absolutely necessary at this point to do an independent inspection of the documents. They went on to say this kind of review would make way for “highly personal information” like diaries and journals, to be separated from the investigation and rightly returned to the former president, along with other documents that might be protected under attorney-client privilege or even executive privilege.
Here’s more from the report:
The Justice Department says an appointment is unwarranted because investigators have completed their review of potentially privileged records and identified “a limited set of materials that potentially contain attorney-client privileged information.”
The government says Trump lacks legal grounds to demand the return of presidential documents because they do not belong to him. The department has also expressed concerns that the appointment could delay the investigation, in part because a special master probably would need to obtain a security clearance to review the records and special authorization from intelligence agencies. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon said she would issue a written ruling at some point.
Cannon had said on Saturday, before the latest arguments in the matter, that her “preliminary intent” was to appoint a special master. It was not clear whether she might make a final determination Thursday or how her view might be affected by the fact that the Justice Department says it has already reviewed potentially privileged documents.
A lot of folks might not know who can be placed in a position such as special master and as of now, no one else seems to know who might be a good fit for it either. The report noted that in the past, especially with high-profile cases like this one, that role was filled by a former federal judge. That could be the direction this ultimately ends up going. We’ll have to wait and see.
Judge Cannon was nominated to her position by former President Trump in 2020 and then confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 56-21 later in the year. She formerly served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida, going on to handle a number of criminal appeals cases.
Having someone review the documentation is absolutely essential. The FBI seems to be awfully nervous about having someone come in and look at these documents, which does not do much to instill confidence in their innocence in proclaiming the raid was not politically motivated. Then again, most of us aren’t stupid enough to think anything else but politics is at work here.
The left needs votes. Democrats need them desperately in November in order to prevent their party from losing control of both chambers in the midterms. What they also want, desperately, is for Joe Biden to not run against Trump a second time in 2024, assuming the billionaire runs again and wins the primary nomination. So, they are pulling out all of the stops to make it happen. So far, they are failing. Let’s hope that streak continues.
