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Trump’s furious response to DOJ appealing the special master ruling nails the FBI

September 9, 2022 | | Print Article

The Department of Justice appealed Judge Aileen Cannon’s special master ruling on Thursday, prompting an angry response from former President Donald Trump in which he re-upped his concerns about the feds planting “fake evidence” at his home.

“So now the FBI & Biden Department of ‘Justice’ leakers are going to spend Millions of Dollars, & vast amounts of Time & Energy, to appeal the Order on the ‘Raid of Mar-a-Lago Document Hoax,’ by a brilliant and courageous Judge whose words of wisdom rang true throughout our Nation, instead of fighting the record setting corruption and crime that is taking place right before their very eyes,” the former president wrote on Truth Social.

“They SPIED on my Campaign, lied to FISA COURT, told Facebook ‘quiet,’ preside over worst CRIME WAVE ever!! … They leak, lie, plant fake evidence, allow the spying on my campaign, deceive the FISA Court, RAID and Break-Into my home, lose documents, and then they ask me, as the 45th President of the United States, to trust them. Look at the I.G. Reports on Comey, McCabe, and others. Things are safer in the middle of Central Park!”

Look:

In addition to appealing Cannon’s Monday ruling, the DOJ also asked that she stay an order prohibiting department investigators from inspecting the documents that were seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last month.

The DOJ defended this request by arguing that blocking its investigators from inspecting the documents will impact its “criminal investigation” into Trump and therefore harm both the “the government and public.”

“Without a stay, the government and public … will suffer irreparable harm from the
undue delay to the criminal investigation. The public has an ‘interest in the fair and expeditious administration of the criminal laws.’ … [A]ny delay poses significant concerns in the context of an investigation into the mishandling of classified record,” the request reads.

As previously reported, in her Monday order, Cannon authorized the appointment of a special master to review the documents. She also stipulated that DOJ investigators may not inspect said documents for the purposes of a criminal investigation until they’ve first been reviewed by the special master.

As a result, the investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of allegedly classified documents has been put on hold, and the DOJ is, it would appear, upset about this.

So much so that in their Thursday filing, the department threatened to file their appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta if Cannon fails to grant their stay by Sept. 15th.

In her Monday order, Cannon did say that the DOJ may review the documents “for purposes of intelligence classification and national security assessments.”

But in the appeal filed Thursday, the DOJ argued that it makes no sense to separate this review from the criminal review mentioned earlier.

“The Court’s order expressly permits the government ‘to review and use the [seized]
materials for purposes of intelligence classification and national security assessments,”’ … while enjoining the government from using the seized records ‘for criminal investigative purposes,'” this request reads.

“But those processes are inextricably intertwined. Absent a stay with respect to the classified records, therefore, the injunction will as a practical matter prevent the IC’s classification review and national security risk assessment from proceeding effectively.”

Why?

The Daily Beast explains that “the intelligence assessment isn’t just an ivory-tower reading of documents by a bunch of nerdy analysts working in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) but requires working with the documents to answer such crucial questions as who may have accessed the classified documents, who they may have been disseminated to, and where else classified documents might be located.”

“These answers come only from investigative steps like tracking down and talking to witnesses, reviewing surveillance and other forensic data, and following up on leads that emerge from this process. By banning such steps, Cannon ignores the fact that the FBI is part of the intelligence community that is tasked with assessing the classified documents. Her ban is really a ban on the DOJ and the FBI’s ability to properly protect national security.”

The bad news for the DOJ but good news for Trump is that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is stocked with his appointees.

“His appointees and their conservative colleagues made their presence known in a September 2020 opinion that allowed Florida to make it harder for felons to vote. In a 6-4 decision, the court overturned a lower court’s finding that a Florida law violated felons’ voting rights by requiring them to pay fines, restitution and legal fees after serving time and before casting ballots. All of the dissenting judges were Democratic appointees,” Insider notes.

Vivek Saxena
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