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Mar-a-Largo raided by FBI?

Politesse said:
So is it... just going to be legal to steal things from the government from now on?
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Only if you can afford the lawyers to launch and maintain a “storage dispute”.

I should think libberpublicans would be up in their copious arms, given this assault on Property Rights. There is nothing to prevent the same principle from applying right down to the level of street pickpockets and purse-grabbers. A gang of RW thugs can come forcibly kick you out of your house, and there’s nothing you can do about it if the thugs’ Boss has resources.
 
I guess it's not greatly different from the insurrection at Malheur in general principle: "the government leases it to us, so it now our property and our use of it cannot be regulated by the law". Or elaborated: "the only difference between access and ownership is a demand."
 
Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were only news clippings

Months before National Archives officials retrieved hundreds of classified documents in 15 boxes from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump had only 12 boxes of “news clippings,” according to people familiar with the conversations between Trump’s team and the Archives.


During a September 2021 phone call with top Archives lawyer Gary Stern, former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin offered reassuring news: Philbin said he had talked to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who made the assertion about the dozen boxes of clippings, the people familiar with the call said. Trump’s team was aware of no other materials, Philbin said, relaying information he said he got from Meadows.

The characterization made in the call vastly misrepresented the scale and variety of documents, including classified records, eventually recovered by the Archives or the FBI.
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news.yahoo.com

Column: The Mar-a-Lago judge's latest opinion is as atrocious as legal experts say it is

Federal Judge Aileen Cannon isn't just leaning in to support Donald Trump, she's falling all over him.
news.yahoo.com news.yahoo.com
Thursday’s 10-page opinion by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon denying the government’s motion for a stay in the Mar-a-Lago documents case is being savaged by commentators in terms normally reserved for grotesque transgressions of justice like the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision.

Respected and generally sober legal analysts have called it an atrocity, “legally and practically incoherent,” “dangerous garbage,” and declared Cannon “a partisan hack.” “No honest and competent legal analyst could have ruled as she did,” tweeted Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe.

Could the opinion really be that bad?

In a word, yes.
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The article then goes on to explain...
But Cannon adopted Trump’s Alice-in-Wonderland approach. She concluded that it would not be “appropriate” — the closest thing to legal reasoning in her opinion — "to accept the government’s conclusion on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third-party," that is, a special master.

Cannon, in essence, is redefining the classification process to be simply a provisional executive branch judgment subject to overruling by individual judges such as herself. Apart from its legal bankruptcy, such a process would wreak bedlam in matters of national intelligence, which turn on the very designations that Cannon set aside.

The Trump team’s next gambit, which the judge also adopted, was even more logically and legally threadbare. The former president has argued repeatedly in public that he declassified the documents. But his attorneys have studiously avoided saying that in court papers, where lies are subject to professional and criminal penalties. The Trump filings indicate only that he perhaps had declassified the documents.

The appropriate response for a judge in these circumstances is to put Trump on the stand and ask him, “Did you or didn’t you?” Failing that, “perhaps” means the matter is not established and the argument loses.

But Cannon either does not know or does not care what judges do in such a situation. It is important to emphasize that she isn’t simply leaning in Trump’s direction, she’s falling all over him.
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www.yahoo.com

Trump team resists special master’s request to explain declassification of Mar-a-Lago documents

Former President Trump’s legal team on Monday night resisted a request to elaborate on his claims around declassifying the documents recovered last month from his Mar-a-Lago home. In a filing to the court-appointed special master that Trump requested, his attorneys said the “time and place” for...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com
Former President Trump’s legal team on Monday night resisted a request to elaborate on his claims around declassifying the documents recovered last month from his Mar-a-Lago home.

In a filing to the court-appointed special master that Trump requested, his attorneys said the “time and place” for making such a disclosure would come in a motion in a criminal trial as an effort to recover his property.

“Otherwise, the Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order,” Trump’s legal team wrote.
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  • Roll Eyes
Reactions: jab
Plaintiff (yeah, Trump is the fucking Plaintiff in this portion of the case): I didn't steal that coat. I can prove it!

Judge: Do you have the receipt?

Plaintiff: Providing a receipt could be detrimental to our case.

Judge: *drops anvil on lawyers*

So, Special Master says these documents aren't privileged because Trump didn't show cause for that, and they appeal eventually to SCOTUS? Seems like a massive delay strategy.
 
From the Trump response:
"The fact that the documents contain classification marks does not necessarily negate claims of privilege. For example, the partially unredacted search warrant affidavit states that certain documents with classification markings allegedly contain what appear to be President Trump's handwritten notes. A57-58. Those notes could certainly contain privileged information; further supporting the need for an independent third-party review of these documents"
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Just admitting to another crime, defacing classified documents.

And he's not the fucking president. He doesn't have privilege anymore.
 
Trump's lawyer's response

Basically, "Can we delay this until after the mid-terms pretty please?" with the very classy letterhead,

ifrah.png

If you can't read the slogan, it says "Hands-on counsel, gloves off litigation". You just fucking know Trump has heard about Better Call Saul and thought, "I need a layer just like that! What could go wrong?"
 
Patooka said:
Trump's lawyer's response

Basically, "Can we delay this until after the mid-terms pretty please?" with the very classy letterhead,

View attachment 40413

If you can't read the slogan, it says "Hands-on counsel, gloves off litigation". You just fucking know Trump has heard about Better Call Saul and thought, "I need a layer just like that! What could go wrong?"
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I used to produce the radio ads for a law firm. They were known primarily for their personal injury cases ("in a wreck? Need a check? Make one call, that's all.") and their phone number is in the jingle. (Lerner and Rowe for those of you in Arizona, Las Vegas, and Chicago). The one partner I worked with was actually a nice guy, and I'd bet money that if someone - even Trump - asked them to handle anything other than injury, bankruptcy, or a low level criminal offense, he'd say "that's way out of my wheelhouse...you need to get a firm that specializes in that sort of thing."

In other words, an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer has more integrity that the folks Trump has hired.
 
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