You know the story: Trump brought thousands of government documents to his home at Mar-A-Lago, his resort in Florida, where security is very lax. That trove of documents included many that were Top Secret or otherwise classified. He appealed to a judge he appointed and she granted his desire to have the trove reviewed by a “special master,” which will delay the process of retrieving the documents by many months. The judge was confirmed one week after Trump’s election loss in 2020.
Public Citizen, a nonpartisan ethics advocacy group, sent out the following request:
Donald Trump got caught hoarding government documents at his compound in Florida.
As we saw throughout his presidency, Trump has difficulty understanding the distinction between what belongs to him and what belongs to the American people.
Yesterday, a judge who was appointed by Trump ruled that all 11,000 documents recovered in the FBI’s lawful search of Mar-a-Lago must be reviewed by a “special master” before the Department of Justice can use them in its criminal investigation of Trump’s improper paper grab.
- Our friends Norman L. Eisen and Fred Wertheimer have an excellent article in Slate today that explains this “incredibly flawed” ruling.
- One crucial point they make is that it is impossible that documents stamped “top secret” or “classified” belong to Trump personally or are protected by attorney-client privilege.
- More generally, presidential records belong to the U.S. government, not an individual president.
It comes down to a simple question: Is Donald Trump above the law or not?
Thanks for taking action.
For justice,
– Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
Public Citizen | 1600 20th Street NW | Washington DC 20009 |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course, Trump is above the law. The people who got him elected, for example, Steve Bannon, and the people who enabled him while he was in office, e.g. Bill Barr and Tom Emmer, act upon the belief that God’s law is above man’s. Their goal is to maintain a government ruled by Christian protestant and Conservative Catholic, male, social Darwinists.
The site K12Alternative.org and the United in Purpose site show us the religious right that is advancing to destroy democracy.
“The Law is what you make it”
When judge decides the law
The oft recited saw
“To all the laws apply”
Is really just a lie
“Special Lawrativity”
“No one is above the law”
Except the one who is
To some, it seems a fatal flaw
But judge decides the biz
I agree. This ruling has been read and analyzed by experts in the rule of law who agree that not only is the text of the ruling
flawed, but that in the footnotes to the ruling that the judge states she does not have the authority to rule on the matter before her.
The public should be made aware of the religious demographics of the Federalist Society lawyers. The judge referenced in the post is Federalist Society. Leonard Leo, the man responsible for the Trump-appointed SCOTUS judges and other conservative judges is Leonard Leo. He received an award from a Catholic organization for what he has done to the country.
“Black Widows”
Supremes are the Deciders
Of whether law applies
They really are like spiders
Who weave a web of lies
This gets down two life or death points (dramatic? yes! Overstated? No!): Voice and Vote!
And, the following sounds silly, immature, Junior High*? Why not? We’re school people. And we’ve been fighting junior high behaviors and bullying with logic and boring speeches. AND – the post added above since I started this is a perfect example of “calling them out” about which I am writing this.
Day after day after day for six years this man has and continues to abuse people and power, hold inexplicable Jim Jones power over once-respected politicians and incompetent surrogates, and spew hate and lies that are now millions of people’s reality. And he is very good at wearing people out.
Ignoring bullies means acceptance of the situation and cowering to their presence, and validating their slurs and lies for their followers. Protests, marches, and petitions matter to show we’ve not given up or are apathetic.
Silence is acceptance.
And, we need startling, unanticipated, out of the box, attention getting events. Seriously. One million copies of Fahrenheit 451 or the Manchurian Candidate delivered to MaraLago. Pop up protests in attention getting places (Told you this was junior high).
And, the same “public comment” made at every Board of Education meeting across the country in late October and November. Headlines in small town papers: “Parents Demand End to Lies, Misinformation, and Hate Speech in Elections” (doesn’t matter what election – it makes a headline!
Sounds silly? Immature? Junior High? You bet. We’re school people.
And, by gosh… vote, observe at the polls.
*No offense to “junior high” – I taught it for years and they’re the best kids ever, just kids needing time to mature
The problem is that the ignorant are generally the ones to exercise freedom of speech. Those with discriminatory ability generally exercise caution and restraint. Thus the magnification of man’s passions, whether it be Marat in the French Revolution or some more modern instance of crowd stirrings, the more moderate in a population are generally less vocal. For these people to speak, it takes a ballot. For these people to be motivated to vote, it takes a leader with courage.
People who think beyond the confirmation bias know the truth as presented here. The solution is for teachers to refuse to teach to the test, and then put Debate Coaches in charge of schools. Make thinking legal again.
If one teacher gets disciplined for refusing to teach to the test, all teachers, around the country should strike. That’s how systemic change begins. This is the perfect time !
That says it.
And “Make Truth Legal Again” should be on bumper stickers and billboards across the country! It’s perfect
Well worth watching, if you did catch its first airing last evening…
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/lies-politics-and-democracy/
It was bracing. A good summary.
Thanks, Ed. Frontline is my candidate for the best thing that ever appears on television. Their documentary on how Bannon, Miller, and Sessions CHOSE TRUMP to be the candidate to carry forward their white supremacist, anti-immigrant agenda, is breathtakingly good. It’s called Zero Tolerance. Their series of interviews with Russian experts re: Putin is outstanding, just breathtaking, again. I’ve watched, I don’t know, some 20 of them. Frontline actually goes into depth, and they have done this for many decades. Back in the day, they were telling the ugly truth about the Second Iraq War, for example. It’s a program for thinkers, not for ideologues.
I wish that everyone would watch Frontline’s Zero Tolerance. It’s revelatory.
cx: “…if you did not catch…”
In her decision granting Trump his “Special Master,” this Trump-appointed judge is blatant about applying special, or “Just Us,” rules to Trump: “As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own.” She then goes on, in her decision, to argue against the principle that a current president can overrule a former president’s assertions of Executive Privilege. She seems to think, as the current Extreme Court does, that a president is a king and that once a king, always a king.
All this makes an utter MOCKERY of the principle carved onto the West Pediment above the front entrance of the United States Supreme Court building: Equal Justice under Law.
The Teflon Don, Cheeto “Littlefingers” Trumpbalone, slides again.
By all means, let’s give this seditious, traitorous criminal a get out of jail free card so he can delay action for months while he runs for president again to establish his immunity from prosecution. Sickening. One law for this creep and his ilk. Another for the little people. All the cognitively challenged who heeded his call to try to prevent the newly elected government from taking office? Well, those are “little people.” They are being indicted, prosecuted, and sent to jail. But the chief of the conspirators? The one behind it all? Nada. He gets to run for president again.
Imagine if you are I had one of these documents and this became known. But you see, there is one law for us and another for him.
@%#&@#$%&@&%&&$#@!!#!!!!!!!
The Teflon Don slides again, and this judge has greased the way. Even he can’t always ride solely on his self-generated slime.
Now there will be a fight over the person chosen to be the special master. That will take time. Still, there is another aspect of this.
It is obvious from Biden’s weekend speeches, that the Democrats feel they are benefiting from making Trump the issue. Biden was poking the tiger to be sure. Republicans have groused that they should be talking about inflation, and all anybody wants to discuss is Trump’s speeches. If they are correct, Trump may be the issue all the way until 2024, disturbing the Republican desire to move on to DeSantis or some other wantabe.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro appears to be poised to refuse to step down in the wake of his possible defeat at the Brazilian polls. Could a coup there attract attention to similar behavior here?
And what of Russia and Ukraine? The Republicans have had no luck trying to pin the Russian invasion on Biden. This has obviously been the most dramatic incident in the rising energy costs fueling real inflation.
There are a lot of question marks in the American body politic.
This might take months, even years. It’s disgusting. Sickening. A bad joke. Stick a fork in democracy. It’s done [with].
This criminal had in his possession, illegally, many, many documents with the highest possible security ratings, ones so sensitive that some of them were need to know only, even for people with the highest security clearances, and could be read only in secure facilities and not, under any circumstances, taken from those. He had these lying around his office, in an unlocked room downstairs, in closets. And some of them have disappeared entirely, leaving only their folders behind. Pretty egregious, his actions, when you are aware that disclosure of the information in document with this level of classification would cause grievous harm to the country. That’s why they are so classified.
And not only did he illegally take these to his freaking beach house, but when the government asked for them, he and his lawyers signed a document saying that they had turned everything over, and this was false. It was a lie.
So, mishandling of top-secret defense info and human intel, and obstruction of the government’s efforts to secure it. And this “judge” responds in this way. Some judgement, judge.
judgment, no e, ofc
If we do not put Trump in prison for attempting to hold hostage a program meant to help an ally, how can we ever hope he will serve time for what he can claim to be oversight. He will ultimately just plead that his people didn’t know what they had. It was all a misunderstanding, you know.
We should have put Nixon behind bars for Watergate, Reagan for Iran/Contra, Clinton for Monica, and Bush II for lying about WMDs. That would have made the presidency have the proper relationship to the Congress and the judiciary.
Sorry, but Monica was of age. Yes, the relationship was inappropriate, egregiously so, and he should have resigned because of it, but it wasn’t illegal.
Some reading for you in your retirement, Roy:
If I had top secret human intel in my home, and my home were raided and it was found, do you think that I would get anywhere with a claim that this was “just an oversight.” Oh, gosh, I left my luggage unattended for a moment at an airport; someone must have slipped it in there. Of course not. Possession of these materials is illegal. Trump was required to turn over all presidential records to the National Archives. Every president has done this since the Presidential Records Act was passed. Trump alone has refused. And he continued to refuse after he DOJ asked him the first time.. He LIED, saying that he had turned everything over when he knew damned good and well he hadn’t. This is obscene. It’s OBVIOUSLY illegal. And its illegality of the utmost seriousness. It’s in a class with murder or kidnapping, among the most egregious acts that a person can commit. It’s freaking espionage.
Bill lied about Monica. My point is that presidents should be above conventional morality if they are going to be treated above the law. Perjury should be taken seriously, even if it is about a personal triviality.
Ever the lawyer, Clinton claimed that he didn’t commit perjury when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” because sexual relations means, he says, intercourse, and not oral sex, which is the kind that they had.” It was a lawyerly stunt but arguable.
Not a particularly strong oral argument.
But very emotional.
SDP: an incorrigible pun. Breathtaking.
Bob: you are correct about Clinton specifically. My main point was that the imperial presidency we have come to at various times in history is the poison of representative government. Buchanan very nearly gave the south a right to secede with his behavior. Jackson refused to carry out a judicial directive that n Cherokee Nation B Georgia. We have come to write the checks and try to balance.
It might be debatable whether Clinton perjured himself but that he purged himself is beyond debate. It was recorded on the blue dress. Where is that now, by the way? In the Clinton Library? The National Archives? The FBI evidence locker?
Not a strong oral argument!!! ROFL.
I did some fact checking through Google yesterday, and form what I read the DOJ can appeal this judge’s ruling to a higher court all the way to the top, if needed.
Even Bill Barr says the DOJ should appeal that ruling.
https://news.yahoo.com/bill-barr-says-doj-appeal-224710969.html
So, Trump’s lawyers went to a judge the traitor appointed that must have sworn loyalty to Trump to get that appointment. That judge is not the end if the justice pipeline.
Justice is very slow and doesn’t fund PR campaigns to fight back against traitors, liars and conmen frauds like Traitor Trump who isn’t limited by those kinds of rules, so the traitor has turned this into a mostly one-sided media war where the former chief liar of the United States, the first president to hold that title, is appealing to his base in an attempt to get them to start a bloody Civil War to keep him out of jail and install him as the first emperor of the United States.
What Trump has proved again and again, throughout his traitorous and criminal career, is that if you have the money to throw enough lawyers at a problem, you can slow the process so much that it doesn’t happen, finally, at all. That’s how the Just Us System works, as opposed to the Justice System that you and I live under.
Agreed. There are two justice systems, one for the working class that only works if you have enough wealth (property & cash) to bankrupt yourself paying the lawyers we hire.
Millionaire and billiaonres don’t care. They see the cost of lawyers as a business expense to increase their wealth a nd/or keep them out of prison.
They have the money and their lawyers wont even dent their wealth.
The DOJ is the only force that has the money and ability to go head-to-head with corporations and the wealthy, explaining why ALEC (the organization many of the most wealthy belong to and fund) has been working behind the scenes for decades to strip the federal government of all of its powers.
And Citizens United was one of the battle the feds and the working class lost in that long war.
And, ofc, the intelligence agencies have no way of knowing what was in the 14 disappeared documents or where they went. They know only their level of classification, which is given on the empty folders. Who knows how much damage this man has done, but this judge grabs a pretext to let him do what he has done throughout his life,
Your EZ Guide to Being a Teflon Don
The mobster’s shtick is easy, I say.
One might observe that it’s just child’s play.
Get crooked lawyers to delay and delay
until the trouble goes away.
There are other parts of the modus operandi of the mobster thug, ofc. Cheat and steal the way other people eat and breathe. Remember that nothing and no one matters but increasing your worth and girth. Maintain plausible deniability by getting others to do the dirty work. Demand absolute loyalty but give none. Accuse others of whatever you are doing. Lie constantly, the bigger and balder the lie the better. If someone catches you in a lie, lie about having lied. When they throw something big at you, hit back bigger. Throw tantrums. And throw excuses at the wall to see what sticks, the more the merrier. Confusion is your friend. You are an agent of extreme entropy EXCEPT with regard to the cash flow in to you. When push comes to shove, throw your most loyal toadies under the bus. (Sorry about he mixed metaphor.)
the intelligence agencies have no way of knowing what was in the 14 disappeared documents or where they went. They know only their level of classification, which is given on the empty folders”
Sounds like a crazy Fred Flintstone system.
Makes you wonder whether they have Bambam guarding the documents.
Trump lies continually, but he isn’t even a good liar. There are ALMOST ALWAYS tells a) that he is lying and b) that he is quite aware of the fact that he is lying. Here is what he said about the Iowa primary election that he lost to Ted Cruz in 2016:
“Everything about it was disgraceful. It was a fraud as far as I was concerned. . . . It’s a total voter fraud if you think of it, and actually, I came in probably first if you think about it.”
OK. Now here’s the thing about the truth–it has nothing to do with what you think about it. Imagine this statement:
Saying that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen is disgraceful. It’s a fraud as far as I am concerned. It’s a total fraud if you think about it, and actually, its probably made of blue cheese if you think about it.
The truth or falsehood of the proposition has nothing whatsoever to do with what you would like to be true. But Trump is a demented person. He is insane. He actually almost successfully convinces himself that what makes something true is that he wants it to be true.
And the expressions “as far as I am concerned” and “if you think about it” and “actually” and “probably” are all transparently poor attempts to hedge the statement that he knows to be a lie, but Trump isn’t smart enough to come up with a plausible hedge, typically, so he commonly resorts to vagueness. Everybody knows it was a fraud. Biggest fraud in history. That kind of thing.
Trump is a pathological liar.
Those hedges, those tells, are IQ45 desperately trying to find a way to couch his lie in a way that he can plausibly deny later on, when he’s caught in it. But typically Trump, who is really, really dumb, can’t come up with an equivocation. That’s an intellectual feat far beyond this bear of little brain.
The guy is such a moron. He is in his 70s but uses toddler English. “I came in probably first.” OK. I’m going to make myself a cup of espresso now. I’m going to put the sugar in probably first. And I’ll take a few sips small probably first because it will be likely hot.
Trump reminds me of the lout in a high-school class who disrupts it by pushing books off a desk onto the floor to make a noise and then says, “Whut? I didn’t do nothing.” The very mode of expression screams, yes, I did this.
And this judge is letting him get away with it.
Again.
Shameless or stupid. Hard to tell which.
I think this judge is trying to kick the can down the road. If she ruled correctly, she angers Trump’s political base. If she allows the motion, maybe it gets appealed and she is out of the woods. Nothing whispers fascism like the judiciary trying to lay low.
“pathillogical” is the spelling in Trump’s case.
But logic obviously has no bearing on the issue in the case at hand and there is no downside to lying (for Trump or the judges who lie on his behalf).
Judges — and Supreme Court Justices — obviously need not base their decisions on logic or the law. They can decide as they please with no negative ramifications for themselves.
SDP, you are right. With a Supreme firmly in the grip of rightwing ideologues for at least 20 years—unless Democrats miraculously get enough Senators to expand the Court—the SCOTUS can reach any decision, without any logic, facts, or reason.
I wonder if “Judge” Cannon feared untimely defenestration if she ruled against Velveeta Voldemort’s usual “delay and obfuscate” riff.
Cannon may be fearful. But, one of the latest court decisions to take away our rights was made by Federalist Society Judge Reed O’Connor. He doesn’t seem fearful. He seems like a lawyer advancing the theocratic agenda in the manner of a religious zealot.
Americans need to know the religious demographics of the Federalist Society lawyers in order to understand how totally screwed we are from SCOTUS on down.
Geoffrey Berman’s book about William Barr is about to be released. Berman calls Barr, a liar, a bully and a thug. (IMO, that’s a uniform description for a religious zealot like Barr). Berman describes a secret meeting between Barr and Rupert Murdoch.
The question is …Why did he take these documents and what has already done with them?
If we are to honestly answer according to the facts as they exist today, the answer to the question is unequivocally yes. The Idiot will personally escape accountability because of institutional scruples about jailing a former president. Pure and simple. They’re afraid of how it would look to the rest of the world, failing to understand that not holding him accountable crumbles the intent of their logic. Not jailing him for crimes will show how hollow this country’s stated claims about justice and fairness really are.
If any citizen had stolen top secret documents, would he not be considered a threat to the country, a traintor? More so, because he was president.. It is unknown exactly what he did with these documents. He must be investigated and held accountable.