Trump’s legal team has officially responded in court to the DOJ argument that no “special master” is needed.
And they weren’t happy about the DOJ’s argument, ripping them for suggesting that they should be the sole arbiter for these documents.
Via Fox News:
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers Wednesday pushed back against Justice Department arguments that he’s not entitled to have a “special master” to review documents taken by the FBI during a raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump’s attorneys made their argument in a brief filed to Florida federal district court Judge Aileen M. Cannon. They said she should appoint a special master to conduct independent review the classified documents seized by the FBI, and slammed a Tuesday Justice Department filing.
“The United States Attorney’s Office, has filed an extraordinary document with this Court, suggesting that the DOJ, and the DOJ alone, should be entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating its unjustified pursuit of criminalizing a former President’s possession of personal and Presidential records in a secure setting,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
“[T]he Government twists the framework of responding to a motion for a Special Master into an all-encompassing challenge to any judicial consideration, presently or in the future, of any aspect of its unprecedented behavior in this investigation,” Trump’s lawyers also said.
This morning we told you about the DOJ’s latest argument defending their raid on Trump’s home, claiming that he was concealing documents to interfere with their investigation. The photo of the concealed classified documents that they claim they found has come under a lot of scrutiny today, with many suggesting it was nothing more than a staged photo to make Trump look bad:
The Biden FBI staged a dishonest photo with purportedly classified material, with the approval of the Biden DOJ, and submitted it to a court to try to make Trump look bad. These agencies are irredeemably corrupt.
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) August 31, 2022
Trump is especially unhappy with this photo, claiming they put them on the floor for dramatic effect:
Trump & co have been fuming over the photo included in the Justice Department's filing & say as much in this filing, saying investigators "gratuitously included a photograph of allegedly classified materials, pulled from a container & spread across the floor for dramatic effect."
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 1, 2022
Mark Levin also weighed in on this again a few minutes ago, with more thoughts on all of this:
1. The government's filing today was an outrageous political document, not just the photo of the covers of classified material, but long-winded with self-serving allegations.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
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2. For example, there's a footnote about how the FBI seized the former president's passports. After all, they assert, they were investigating potential violations related to national defense. The implication is that Trump was a flight risk. How absurd.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
3. But the FBI kindly returned them. The standing argument is ridiculous, in my view, as the issue is whether there are not just privileged documents among those seized by the FBI, but personal papers as well.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
4. The DOJ attempts to turn this into the Rosenbergs' case. The fact is that the search warrant resulted in finding 3 classified documents in the former president's office desk. That's it, as far as we know from this filing.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
5. The filing uses this as evidence that items were moved from the storage room. But the storage room is where they found the rest of the boxes, including several dozen more classified documents.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
6. They took the folder covers of the documents, spread them on the floor, and took a photograph, included the photograph in their political filing for the world to see.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
7. As I read the Espionage Act, this comes awfully close to the mishandling of such documents. Everything else was in the storage room (not the former First Lady's closet).
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
8. The government said it found several dozen additional classified documents in the boxes in the storage room (hence, the photograph). Could this have been as simple as an error by the lawyer who signed the certification?
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
9. Notice, the lawyer did not sign a certification that he had firsthand knowledge. This is not an excuse, but a reasonable conclusion.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
10. Why would a lawyer knowingly lie to the FBI about classified documents in the boxes in the storage room, where the boxes remained up until the time the search warrant was executed, and assume no one would ever find out about them? It makes no sense.
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022
11. Based on what the government has disclosed in today's filing, this is pretty much what we know.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and James Comey roam the planet freely, celebrated by the media, whose homes were never searched.— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) September 1, 2022