The Donald and Judge Dearie

 

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Donald Trump has already lost everything he wanted from a 'special master'

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Sep 24, 2022 7:14am PDT by Mark Sumner, Daily Kos Staff

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"Not one document has been sorted, but Donald Trump has already lost everything he gained when Judge Aileen Cannon appointed a “special master.” In the last week, rulings from that special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, and from a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, have drained the entire process of any value to Trump. That process will continue. But everything Trump hoped to achieve, is gone.

Even before stepping foot in the White House, Donald Trump had been involved in a jaw-dropping 3,500 law suits. From all that time in court spent stiffing contractors, dodging people who paid for condos that were never built, and feigning ignorance over tax fraud, Trump demonstrated his biggest superpower: Delay. Given enough money, and an unscrupulous attorney, Trump found the legal system offered endless opportunities for motions, appeals, and requests. In a lesson that came straight from his racist father and his legal mentor Roy Cohn, Trump learned early that it was possible to ride out most any storm through the magic of delay.

In the case of the documents that Trump stole from the White House and carted off to Mar-a-Lago, Trump has already worked the refs for 21 months of delay. Thanks to Judge Cannon, he expected the special master process to take him safely through the next three months, gliding past the mid-term elections, while the Department of Justice had to sit on their hands. 

Except what happened this week not only gutted the value of the special master process, they also anticipated Trump’s next moves.

At this point, Trump may be talking up the National Archives as his latest “radical left wing” villains when it comes to interviews with Sean Hannity, but the truth is that Trump has pretty much zero concern for the 11,000 documents taken from Mar-a-Lago and destined to come under control of the Presidential Records Act. Will those documents contain examples of his greed, vanity, and disdain for the nation? Of course they will. And it won’t change a thing.

It’s the 103 classified documents that really concern Trump. Because “Donald Trump took this Top Secret document describing secrets of the [insert nation here] nuclear program and refused to give it back, even under subpoena” is exactly the kind of charge that a grand jury can easily understand when raising their hands in favor of an indictment. And that’s assuming that all those empty folders don’t represent classified documents that have gone completely missing, because that’s an even simpler charge.

What’s happening with the Jan. 6 investigation, and the broader investigation of attempts to overturn the 2020 election is difficult to discern, because so much of that investigation has happened under seal or behind closed doors. What’s happening with the document search at Mar-a-Lago is very public. It’s also very simple: Trump stole documents. He lied about them to federal agents. He refused to return them. He’s lying about them still. 

What we can see of the investigation into classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago represents the greatest single chance that Donald Trump will be indicted on criminal charges within the next few months. How good the odds of the FBI showing up at Mar-a-Lago to retrieve something other than documents might be is hard to tell, but it is a non-zero chance. And Trump knows it. . ."

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