Left-wing pundits cried foul after a Trump-appointed federal judge granted the former president’s request for a special master, putting a temporary pause on at least part of the Justice Department’s investigation following the FBI’s unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted the Trump request on Monday, earning the ire of the former president’s critics.
Andrew Weissmann, a former top prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller, tweeted: “Cannon uses existence of a small number of personal items found in search (and properly seized pursuant to warrant) to find standing to review ALL docs including vast majority that are STOLEN.”
JUDGE TEMPORARILY HALTS PROSECUTORS FROM USING MAR-A-LAGO DOCS IN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION
The judge had said the DOJ’s privilege review team admitted some of the items seized from Mar-a-Lago included medical records, tax correspondence, and accounting information and that the DOJ acknowledged it had seized roughly 500 pages of documents potentially subject to attorney-client privilege.
Weissmann continued: “The Cannon decision is a direct result of a President and party that have appointed partisans to the bench who don’t take their oaths seriously to administer the law equally and fairly.”
Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama appointed by President Barack Obama and also an MSNBC contributor, chimed in to add to Weissmann’s commentary that “even worse than that, she bootstraps them to interfere with a federal criminal investigation into top secret materials that are missing after that investigation was obstructed by the man she grants relief to.”
Laurence Tribe, a university professor emeritus at Harvard University who called on the DOJ to indict and convict Trump in August, went further.
“Cannon’s order will go down as part of the judicial anticannon — the body of decisions, like Dred Scott or Korematsu, that lawyers use for generations to teach students how NOT to wield the judicial power,” he tweeted.
The 1857 Dred Scott decision concluded that black people whose ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves could not be American citizens even if they had been freed and sharply limited the ability of Congress to pass anti-slavery laws. The ruling was undone by the 13th and 14th amendments.
The 1944 Korematsu decision upheld President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order related to the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two. Federal courts overturned the conviction of Fred Korematsu in 1983, and the Supreme Court repudiated the decision in 2018.
Neal Katyal, a professor of national security law at Georgetown University Law School who wrote Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump in 2019, claimed that “this special master opinion is so bad it’s hard to know where to begin” in a lengthy Twitter thread. He also went on The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC to argue, “There’s so much breadth to this ruling that I think the Justice Department has to appeal… I think this is a real real mistake.”
Cannon had emphasized that her ruling “shall not impede the classification review and/or intelligence assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”
Norm Eisen, who was a special counsel to the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee in 2019 to 2020 as it impeached Trump and is now a CNN legal analyst, said that there was a conflict between Cannon’s order for the DOJ investigation to pause while the intelligence community assessment continues.
“Are we actually in a world where these extremely dangerous national security documents, ones that may have jeopardized lives, are going to be — over 100 of them, classified documents — are possibly going to be reviewed by this special master for return to Donald Trump at the same time that the judge says that the danger is so grave that we have to let the intelligence community review continue?” Eisen said on Out Front on CNN. “I think that is an internal inconsistency.”
The judge had ruled on Monday that Trump’s arguments for a special master had merit.
“[Trump] has claimed injury from the threat of future prosecution and the serious, often indelible stigma associated therewith,” Cannon wrote. “As a function of [Trump’s] former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own. A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”
The DOJ had argued that the “appointment of a special master is unnecessary and would significantly harm important governmental interests, including national security interests.”
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Cannon, who graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 2007 and worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida from 2013 into 2020, was nominated by Trump to the federal bench in May 2020, and she was confirmed by the Senate in November 2020 in a 56-21 vote.
Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who is a contributing editor for the conservative National Review, also predicted the DOJ would appeal and poked some holes in Cannon’s ruling, calling the judge’s rationale for exercising equitable jurisdiction “problematic” and writing that her reasoning on the issue of whether Trump has proper standing “emphasizes the irrelevant while essentially dodging the main issue.”
