I almost feel guilty about the weather. Where I am, it’s lovely. Bright sunshine, temperatures in the 60s. This is my favorite kind of weather, sunny but not hot. I hope everyone in Florida is getting through the storm okay.
Trump doesn’t want to have to do his homework. Reuters reports,
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are resisting a federal judge’s instruction to submit a sworn declaration on whether they believe the government’s list of property taken from Trump’s Florida estate is accurate.
According to a letter publicly filed by Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday, the former president’s legal team told Senior U.S. Judge Raymond Dearie, who is reviewing the materials taken in the federal raid of the Florida property, that they don’t believe Dearie has the authority to require them to make such a filing.
I am not a lawyer. But if you’re the one bringing a lawsuit claiming the FBI took things from you that you should get back, and/or that some of the stuff the feds say they took wasn’t really in your house, this doesn’t seem like an outrageous request. Put up or shut up.
The Trump lawyers’ letter, dated Sept. 25, says the order by another federal judge appointing Dearie to conduct the outside review of the materials only requires that the government file a declaration on the accuracy of the inventory list, and not Trump.
Trump’s lawyers also said they could not verify the accuracy of the property list because they do not currently have access to information taken in the raid that was marked as classified.
The Trump lawyers are complaining that the records they are supposed to review make up 200,000 pages of material. That’s a fantasy number they came up with, I believe. That’s plenty to keep them busy without dealing with the classified material that Trump is not ever going to get back, anyway.
The lawyers also are complaining because Dearie wants the review done by October 7. Originally he wanted it done by September 30, but with the delays in producing digital files for everyone to review (since no one would work for Trump) it’s been moved to October 7.
This universe of documents reflects the contents of 27 boxes plus the contents of Trump’s desk drawer (ignoring the 520 pages of potentially privileged documents, some of which came from the desk drawers, and all but one email of which Trump has had for 13 days). If the 200,000 number were accurate, every box and the drawer would have, on average, over 7,000 pages of documents, which is far more than even a large case of paper would include (10 reams of paper at 500 pages each, or 5,000). And some of these boxes include books (33 altogether) and clothing or gifts (19 total), which would fill space really quickly.
But even assuming that someone in government told him that the 27 boxes of documents plus the contents of Trump’s desk drawer amount to 200,000 pages of material, even assuming Trump would need to review every page of every government document he stole, this is still misleading.
That’s because the boxes also include clippings, up to 121 in a box, for 1,671 total. A typical news article printed out can run 10 pages or more (recall that Trump’s White House cut his NYT subscription). One “clipping” — in box 27 — spans over four years, July 2016 to September 2020.
See also Mark Sumner at Daily Kos. No way there are 200,000 pages. And I’m guessing that the bulk of the non-classified documents, however many pages there are of them, can be dealt with in a glance. They don’t have to read old New York Times stories all the way through. Trump’s lawyers should shut up and get ready to start glancing.
In other news: The sedition trial of Stewart Rhodes and some other Oath Keepers is about to begin. The defense intends to claim that they believed they’d been ordered to attack the Capitol by Donald Trump.
They intend to tell the jury that when armed teams of Oath Keepers made plans to rush into Washington from Virginia on Jan. 6, 2021, they believed they would be following legal orders from the president himself.
Lawyers for the five defendants are set to argue at the trial — which began on Tuesday with jury selection — that the Oath Keepers were waiting on Jan. 6 for President Donald J. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a Revolutionary-era law that grants the president wide powers to deploy the military to quell unrest in emergencies.
As the trial in Federal District Court in Washington moves forward, lawyers in the case have said, Mr. Rhodes intends to take the stand himself and testify that even though Mr. Trump never did invoke the act, the Oath Keepers believed that he was going to do so. Their preparations for violence on Jan. 6, he will argue, should be thought of as a lawful attempt to help the president, not as an illegal attack against the United States.
This seems lame as a defense. The Oath Keepers are not “the military,” and the Insurrection Act, invoked or not, doesn’t apply to them. But it does seem to throw Trump under the bus. It suggests Trump really did instigate the violence because his followers were doing what they thought he wanted them to do.
It appears that Judge Loose Cannon struck again today.
———- from Raw Story article
Dearie had given Trump a Sept. 30 deadline to attest to what was seized at Mar-a-Lago, but Cannon over-ruled the special master she appointed and said the former president would first have a chance to review the seized documents, which may include 200,000 pages.
That wasn't the only way she delayed the case. She set a new deadline of Oct. 5 to finalize a document review vendor, a step Dearie had hoped would have only taken one or two days.
…wrote former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. "Judge Cannon tinkers badly with (and with typos) Judge Dearie's scheduling order, relieving Trump of obligation to say whether docs were planted…
———-
Delay continues to be the tRump game plan.
I'm old enough to remember the Paris Peace Talks between the US and North Vietnam during the 70s. They argued for weeks over the shape of the table they would sit at and the seating arrangements. All a sham.
In this case, I'm not sure there's any extra delay. The only person fooled by Trump's smoke and mirrors may be Trump. IF the DOJ has decided not to charge Trump until after the midterm elections, the 11th Circuit Court has removed from the jurisdiction of Judge Loose Cannon the evidence that matters. The DOJ could drop charges on Trump in the second week of November, even if the Keystone Cops (AKA Trump's lawyers), working with Judge Cannon, have turned Dearie's best efforts into a three-ring circus. Remember, Trump can not appeal a decision he won. Cannon granted his request – if the outcome isn't what Trump wants, he can't take it up with a higher court.
There is no way DOJ is going to charge Trump with anything before the midterms. And probably not soon after, either.
I'm old enough to remember the Paris Peace Talks between the US and North Vietnam during the 70s. They argued for weeks over the shape of the table they would sit at and the seating arrangements. All a sham.
Ah, the good old days. Thank god we had Kissinger with his strategy of bombing them back to the peace table. What a concept!
Things change just that fast.
"Judge bails Trump out of special master plan that would have forced uncomfortable submissions in court."
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/29/politics/trump-special-master-request-doj-inventory/index.html
If the FBI took everything from my garage, submitted a detailed list, and asked me to verify if everything they say they took is stuff I recognize by their description, I wouldn't know all of it with the level of confidence I could swear to it. It pains me to take the side of Trump's lawyers, but I have to look at this impartially.
I don't think I could ID "Classified Document # 23" and DOJ can't describe the contents of most of the Secret and Top Secret documents even generally. If the list said, "Transcript of Macron with hooker engaged in simulating the pee-pee tape", Trump could confirm two scandals in one admission. The only items significant to an impending Espianoage Act violation that Trump would recognize by description, he has to take the 5th on.
The bar for conviction seems low to me. If DOJ can show beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had Top Secret, Secret, and/or Classified documents in his possession after he was informed in specific detail that these items were government property AND if after that Trump's representative in writing said no documents bearing such markings existed on the property AND even one such document was discovered on the property in a legal search, Trump is guilty.
To date, Trump's defense has been that he declassified the documents. Which is an admission that he possessed the documents. Even when Trump suggested the FBI might have planted some of the documents, he never has claimed the FBI planted ALL the documents. How many documents do you need for a conviction?
One.
The 11th Circuit called the "classification" dispute a Red Herring because the status of the documents isn't a factor. Regardless, they are government property. I think DOJ needs to describe for a jury the nature of some of the documents – for example, "The transcript of an intercepted conversation with the head of a foreign government" or "Technical descriptions of the state of development of nuclear weapons by a hostile foreign power."
A classified (and obsolete) document is also a violation of the statute but to convict a former president, the potential damage to national security is required to secure a conviction. (IMO)
In his entire life, tRUMP hasn't read even 199,990 pages – let alone 200,000.
Good luck to the Oaf keepers and their claim that they thought they were doing what Trump wanted them to do. You know what they say about thought? Thought shit in his pants because he thought they were down.
At this point it looks like a lost chess match. Trump can stall and run but winning is out of the question. If manners came into play, Trump should surrender. Since Trump has no manners, he will play on in a lost cause. Being polite and sensible would be out of character. So too it seems is the case with Putin. Polite and sensible is a sign of weakness they must feel. If they were thinking they need to admit they lost and let the world get on trying to do its mission. Who knows what that is, but it is certainly not pandering to either's inflated ego.
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