(Today’s piece will not have any photos as my mad genius designer is on vacation.)
In a highly criticized decision, a Florida judge has granted the Don’s wish to have a special master appointed to review the documents seized by the F.B.I.
Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who sits on the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, also blocked federal prosecutors from further examining the seized materials for the investigation until the special master had completed a review. And in a statement that many legal experts consider unprecedented, Cannon suggested that a former president may have some wiggle room when it comes to executive privilege. Rumor has it that the information for the possibility of wiggle room came while eating Jello. A true eureka moment to rival Kekule’s discovery of the Benzene ring while dreaming of a snake.
According to Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at N.Y.U. the decision “seems oblivious to the nature of executive privilege.” Here is Shane again: “Even if there is some hypothetical situation in which a former president could shield his or her communications from the current executive branch, they would not be able to do so in the context of a criminal investigation — and certainly not after the material has been seized pursuant to a lawful search warrant.”
Cannon did allow for a separate review of the documents, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to continue. The D. N. I. can continue to assess the risk to national security that the insecure holding of sensitive documents at Mar-Lago may have caused. I guess some part of her partisan brain realized that the discovery of documents pertaining to the nuclear capability of another country represented a threat to national security. But she is missing the bigger picture, which would be expected given her predilection for Jello) and the most obvious one: THE PERSON WHO REPRESENTS THE GREATEST RISK TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES IS THE FORMER PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP!
God, it felt so good to capitalize the last sentence-it was so, well, Trumpish!
All I can say is here we go again. A court has never held that a former president can invoke executive privilege to keep records from his time in office away from the executive branch itself. But then this is The Don, who was protected by William Barr in the Mueller investigation for what seemed obvious obstruction of justice, if not colluding with Russia during the 2020 election, who was impeached twice but not convicted by his sycophantic Republican senators-the 2nd time for being at the center of an insurrection!
Even William, Lower the Barr, The Don’s greater protector, criticized the decision. “The opinion, I think, was wrong, And I think the government should appeal it. It’s deeply flawed in a number of ways.”
Here’s what I have to say about Barr’s resurrection career tour: We might not have been dealing with any of this (and all the prior transgressions) if you hadn’t co-opted the Mueller report and dishonestly represented the facts to protect The Don. So Mr. Barr, I have two words for you and they ain’t Merry Christmas. (Hint one of them starts with an F!)
For concerns about national security issues let’s turn to Michael Cohen, who knows a thing or two about the workings of The Don.
“This is all about him. And I stand firm when I say that Donald wants to use this to hold the country hostage. . . . He knows his ass is in the grinder right now. . . . He’s going to use this to ensure that he doesn’t spend the rest of his natural life behind bars charged with treason.”
It has been recently revealed that boxes of documents even came with The Don on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.
Here’s Cohen again: “Let me be very clear, considering I know this ‘Mandarin Mussolini’ extremely well. Donald doesn’t take boxes of material around the world for no reason at all. He took it for nefarious reasons. . . . For all we know, he’s already given it away.”
Chilling indeed. And as I have written in a previous piece, anyone who thinks he isn’t capable of it is fooling themselves. The deal with The Don has been to be incredulous with each new-can you top this- transgressions with the refrain: “Can you believe he did that?” If you understand the man’s psychology, as Michael Cohen does, the answer should always be: “Of course he did and there is nothing he won’t do to get an advantage or protect himself.
Even after the visit by the F.B.I. the Justice Department lawyers are concerned that the judge’s order was impeding efforts to determine whether there may yet be “additional classified records that are not being properly stored” and noted that the search had recovered empty folders marked as classified whose contents “may have been lost or compromised.”
Empty folders? Is it still possible that even after the F.B.I. searched his home, there are still documents he hasn’t turned over; or maybe they are the ones he has already sold?
And that brings me to the man with the “tiny hands” and the big desk. You remember the “tiny hands” drama, when The Don was a candidate for president? Remember when Marco Rubio humiliated himself by implying that The Don’s “tiny hands” implied he had a small penis, and by extension, how can you vote for a man like that.
Well, those “tiny hands” have done some serious damage, including taking top secret documents that don’t belong to him, creating national and perhaps international security risks. And somehow, his hands managed to put a few classified documents in his desk drawer.
Brazen? Stupid? Oblivious? So grandiose that there is no connection to reality that anyone would ever discover them or if they did no biggie?
Imagine an F.B.I. agent turning to his colleague during the search and asking: “You think we should search his desk?” “Really, you can’t be serious,” his buddy responded. Who would leave a top secret document in the desk drawer?
When asked about the appearance of those documents in his desk it is rumored that The Don said: ‘You guys are taking this stuff too seriously. There’s nothing to this stuff. But do you want to see all the snow globes I’ve accumulated from my world travels? How about the love letter from Kim Jung-un.”
The Grand Offal Party 