The DOJ has put out more information on the supposed rationale behind the MAL raid.
Jonathan Turley has this to say about it:
The arguments raised by the Justice Department are not just familiar but transparently weak. The government argues that Trump lacks standing because the records belong to the United States, not him. However, that is the point. The court is trying to determine who has a right to these documents. The Justice Department itself recognizes that it may have gathered some attorney-client privileged documents in this ridiculously broad search. It allowed the seizure of any box containing any document with any classification of any kind — and all boxes stored with that box. It also allowed the seizure of any writing from Trump’s presidency…
…[T]he court itself has ample authority to appoint a special master to help sort through such material…
The Court has the inherent authority to seek such assistance in an independent review of material. Special masters are fairly common helping courts establish the record for ruling on the merits of motions. It may turn out that most or all of this material is properly held by the government, but a Special Master can help establish the record for that decision, including the status of material acknowledged as potential attorney-client material.
The Justice Department also makes the same type of arguments used to oppose the release of a single line of the affidavit in redacted form. It claims that both its investigation and national security would be harmed. That is even less compelling here. A special master would be reviewing documents in a secure facility and would presumably have a clearance. Many of us who have handled national security cases have been cleared for TS/SCI material.
How exactly would a special master review materially undermine national security as opposed to the same review conducted by the Justice Department’s own taint team? The special master is an extension of the court. This is simply a court review in camera of documents….
For those of us who have litigated cases against the Justice Department, it was an all-too-familiar claim by a department notorious for over-classification and over-redaction arguments…
The Department also makes other incomplete or dubious arguments. For example, it asserts that no executive privilege claim can be made by a former president: “The former President cites no case—and the government is aware of none—in which executive privilege has been successfully invoked to prohibit the sharing of documents within the Executive Branch.” That is because this issue has not been fully litigated. It has been a long debate over the ability of former presidents to claim privilege. Indeed, under the Presidential Records Act, such assertions are honored over documents in its possession.
What is clear from this filing is that Merrick Garland will not change his refusal to seek modest steps to assure the public that this investigation is neither pretextual nor political. Instead, he is “all in” on these sweeping and untenable claims of the need for absolute control and secrecy.
There’s a lot more at the link. But Turley’s article, thorough as it is about the legal issues, doesn’t even begin to get into the larger issues here, which are political rather than legal.
First, there is the context. I have little doubt that the DOJ can find a reason to indict Donald Trump – or certainly Joe Biden and especially Hunter Biden – or any politician or you or me. The problem is that they don’t want to indict certain people – people of the Democrat persuasion, for the most part – and are laser-focused on getting Trump for something. That’s what this is about; it’s not about national security or classified papers issues; those are the MacGuffins.
They have been trying to get him from Day One, and they have been lying through their teeth right along. The right knows this and many independents know this. Even some Democrats know this, and mostly seem to think it’s fine because Trump is Evil Incarnate and the ends justify the means. They’ve come to that conclusion because (a) he’s a Republican, and Republicans are semi-Fascists or even Fascists (b) he has a big brash mouth; and (c) the media has been telling them he’s evil and he’s been accused of so many nefarious things that where there’s smoke there’s got to, got to, got to be fire.
Another element of the context for the MAL raid is that, arcane interpretations of arcane statutes and controversial disputes over the power to classify documents aside, it is truly unprecedented to try to indict a former president, and if the DOJ wants to do it, they’d better have an ironclad case of offenses so egregious that even the right sees that he positively had to be stopped.
This is quite clearly not that case here; not even close. And it feeds very strongly into the idea that Trump is being persecuted, and even makes it seems more plausible, not less, that the 2020 was stolen by fraudulent means. It certainly was influenced by lies and coverups, such as the one involving the Hunter Biden laptop.
These are not all separate issues; they form a cohesive attack. One of the assertions in that attack is that Trump is a traitor or a wannabee traitor, and the noble DOJ and FBI had to stop him. That was the leitmotif of Russiagate, the premise of which – that Trump was in Russia’s pocket – was always absurd on the face of it. He was actually one of the tougher presidents in his Russian dealings, but apparently the left, the Democrats, and the MSM either failed to notice that (unlikely) or purposely ignored it (likely) in order to drive their preferred “Trump is a Russian puppet” narrative.
Those behind the MAL raid are trying to make people believe that Trump was going to do something nefarious with these papers, something possibly approaching treason. That is especially absurd because, like Trump or not, his love for this country is obvious. The more likely explanation for the raid – that Trump had some papers with the goods on the DOJ or the FBI, and they wanted to get them back – isn’t mentioned by the DOJ, or course.
I have no idea whether that was the DOJ’s motive, because I think the desire to criminally charge Trump would have been motive enough and was motive enough. They saw a technicality on which they thought they could indict him or at the very least discredit him further than they already have done, and they went for it.
And in my opinion, that is what this is all about.
ADDENDUM: Bonchie at RedState believes they won’t actually charge Trump with anything. As I wrote in the last paragraph of my post, that may be the case and they may just be doing this as further propaganda, because making an actual case that stands up in a court of law is so much harder. But propaganda has worked quite nicely for them in the past.
Bonchie points out that the photo of classified documents scattered about and not in boxes – that was put out by the DOJ – is propaganda that has so far had its intended effect. The usual Trump-haters think this was some sort of bad action by Trump, and haven’t realized that the documents had been in boxes and it was the feds doing the raid who removed them from their containers, spread them out that way, and photographed them.
I believe that encouraging such a misperception was the intent of releasing the photo in the first place.
I also believe they may actually indict him. I can’t even give odds, so I’ll just say 50/50.
