Trump legal team stunned after Special Master they requested has ask for evidence from Trump lawyers
According to reports and new court filing from the legal team of Donald Trump, those attorneys are refusing to comply with a court order for evidence. Some are suggesting that the legal road for Trump is about to get a lot tougher, after a series of “wins” following the DOJ/FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago resort home in early August.
According to Politico, “Donald Trump put the Justice Department on its heels, courtesy of a single federal judge who gave him the benefit of almost every doubt as he fought against the FBI’s probe of documents” they took from Mar-a-Lago.
via Twitter / @KyleCheney
The report continues by explaining how Trump’s team is about to test the limits of their previous “wins” in the matter:
“Now, his team of lawyers is preparing to test whether they can replicate their fortune in front of a potentially more skeptical audience. And the first indication, offered in a filing on Monday night, suggests a tougher road ahead.
The court-appointed “special master” reviewing documents the FBI seized during the Aug. 8 search has asked the former president to disclose details about any materials he claims to have declassified before calling them his property.
In a court filing Monday, Trump’s attorneys urged Raymond Dearie, the senior federal judge based in Brooklyn, to drop a component of his plan that includes asking Trump for those details. Disclosing those during the review, Trump’s attorneys said, was not a requirement of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s order appointing Dearie as special master. And, they added, it could harm Trump’s defense against any forthcoming criminal charges.
“[T]he Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order,” the attorneys wrote.
Trump at Mar-a-Lago via Flickr / Trump White House Archives, Public Domain
Trump’s team’s comments came in response to a request from Dearie for a proposed agenda when he convenes the parties Tuesday for a preliminary conference in his Brooklyn courtroom. And it wasn’t their only gripe with Dearie’s “draft management plan” for the Mar-a-Lago review — which Trump himself demanded and for which his team picked Dearie as one of two acceptable options for the special master role.
Trump’s team also raised concerns about Dearie’s request for information about whether any subsequent Fourth Amendment litigation filed by Trump to reclaim the documents should be filed with the magistrate judge who authorized the search in the first place: Bruce Reinhart, who Trump has assailed without basis as biased against him.”
National Security Lawyer Brad Moss explains how Dearie’s “enough is enough” approach may spell some pretty disappointing bad news for the former President and his legal team:
“Part of the reason Judge Dearie is doing this is I’m sure he saw what order he was given from Judge Cannon. I’m sure he looked at the filing and said ‘enough is enough, I’m not dancing around this. It’s really simple. Either you’ve got the evidence or you don’t.”
Screenshot via YouTube.com
Moss continued by saying that he thinks Trump will have to produce the affidavit that declassified the documents in question to prove they could even be taken outside of the Oval Office, much less the White House or Washington, D.C.
Moss concluded:
“You get what you pay for and you get what you can. And whatever competent qualified lawyer you’d expect to have in this situation when everyone else wants nothing to do with you.”
