You no doubt heard or saw or read that a three-judge federal appeals court threw out part of the ruling that barred federal investigators from using classified documents in Trump’s home. Two of the three judges were Trump appointees.
Blogger Ryan Grim explains what a setback this ruling was for District Judge Aileen Cannon, whose decision to appoint a special master to review thousands of documents and to bar federal investigators the power to use highly classified documents was puzzling to many legal experts.
There was no reason to believe that highly classified documents were Trump’s personal property or covered by executive privilege.
Grim writes:
You’ve probably seen by now that a federal appeals court has sided against former President Trump and allowed the government to start looking at its own classified information again. News reports have described the ruling as “strongly worded,” but I don’t think that really gets at it effectively. Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg used to write “strongly worded” opinions. This reads more like disappointed professors correcting a student who clearly hadn’t been doing the reading or paying attention in class.
Rather than engage in any sophisticated legal reasoning or deep exploration of precedent, the judges here – two appointed by Trump and one appointed by Obama – simply laid out how and why Judge Cannon wasn’t even remotely close to being right in appointing a “special master” to review these documents.
I won’t run through the full 29-page ruling, but here’s a fairly representative moment from it. In order to seize the power needed to appoint a special master, Cannon had to explain how Trump would be irreparably harmed if she didn’t intervene. What she came up with is head-scratching even to non-lawyers like me. The harm to Trump, she argued, is that he might be prosecuted.
On a law school test, you can imagine a professor reading an answer like that and shaking their head.
That’s just plain silly, writes Grim.
Nobody wants to be prosecuted, but the harm of prosecution doesn’t give you extraordinary rights like access to a special master. Can you imagine a defendant telling a judge they can’t show up for a court date because doing so could lead to irreparable harm, namely their own prosecution?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It gets worse. Trump now claims that just by “thinking” he declassified documents. Is Trump really that stupid? [YES, he is!]
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[The Washington Post] Trump says presidents can declassify docs ‘even by thinking about it’
September 22, 2022
Donald Trump claimed in a Fox News appearance that documents taken to Mar-a-Lago were declassified while he was in office
In his first TV appearance since a court-authorized search of his Florida home last month, Donald Trump reasserted Wednesday that any documents taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago were declassified while he was in office, adding that a president can carry that out “even by thinking about it.”
“There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity. Prosecutors have said that about 100 of the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago were marked classified, including some labeled top secret.
“If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified,” the former president added.
“You’re the president — you make that decision.”…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/22/trump-hannity-declassify-documents/
He really is stupid.
The evidence of Traitor Trump’s willing and arrogant stupidity goes back decades to when he was a 20 something instead of an almost 80 something.
“I remember his emphasis and inflection — it went like this — ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had’
DiPrima explained that Kelley told him this after Trump became a celebrity, but “long before” he was deemed a political figure.
“Dr. Kelley often referred to Trump’s arrogance when he told of this — that Trump came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything,” Di Prima added.
https://www.studyinternational.com/news/trump-student-wharton/
The overwhelming evidence proves that Traitor Trump has been stuck in the ‘terrible twos’ for seventy-four years.
“The ‘terrible twos’ refers to a normal stage in a child’s development in which a toddler can regularly bounce between reliance on adults and a newly burgeoning desire for independence. The symptoms vary between children but can include frequent mood changes and temper tantrums.”
Way too generous in that assessment!
A strongly worded opinion for a weak mind! If any regular person had done what Trump did with classified documents, that person would already be behind bars instead of leading his aggrieved rallies in which he plays the victim of a witch hunt. Trump may very well face “harm.” People that do something illegal often face “harm,” as the result of consequences of illegal actions.
Obama made up his own protocol for obtaining and storage of millions of pages of documents and got away with it. Don’t blame Trump for feeling that a corrupt FBI would do anything to sabotage the documents. The cameras were rolling at Mar-a-Lago but who will be watching the FBI as they sort and insert whatever. Yes. I have learned not to trust most of the government agencies. 30+ FBI agents are testifying to it as well
You are a deluded, racist idiot. Please seek help.
Donald Trump reasserted Wednesday that any documents taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago were declassified while he was in office, adding that a president can carry that out “even by thinking about it.”
Obama didn’t use the think method to declassify documents. Trump is a pathological liar and you fell for another of his blatant lies.
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“OBAMA TOOK 30 Million Documents when he left the WHITEHOUSE and No FBI RAID,” read one tweet posted Tuesday, the day after the FBI’s search, that had garnered almost 20,000 likes by Friday.
But these records were given to NARA in 2017, upon the end of Obama’s term, and they remain in NARA’s sole custody, in accordance with federal law. Some 30 million documents were moved to a NARA-operated facility in the Chicago area, as the agency explained in a statement Friday, but none were classified. The administration’s classified documents are stored in a separate NARA facility in the Washington, D.C., area.
Presidential libraries are managed by NARA, and the documents therein belong to the agency, which also manages related public records requests.
Benjamin Hufbauer, a professor at the University of Louisville and a researcher of presidential libraries, reiterated that no White House records remain in Obama’s personal possession.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-obama-million-documents-929954890662
So would this be grounds for Cannon to be impeached?
Be glad you don’t live in Indiana.
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Attorney General Todd Rokita [R-IN] and other states, demand fairness for Trump following unprecedented raid on former president’s home
Attorney General Todd Rokita this week along with the states of Texas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia called for a U.S. appeals court to ensure that former President Donald Trump is afforded necessary legal protections following the Biden administration’s unprecedented nine-hour search of former President Trump’s private residence and its seizure of more than 10,000 documents.
“From the beginning, this intrusion into former President Trump’s private home has been suspect as to whether the standards of professionalism and reasonableness have been met,” Attorney General Rokita said. “The Biden administration has a history of gamesmanship and questionable conduct, which gives us plenty of reason to be skeptical of the motivations leading to the raid.”
Any strategy of weaponizing federal law-enforcement agencies against political opponents has no place in a free republic, Attorney General Rokita said.
“In the past, I have respected the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to uphold the law,” Attorney General Rokita said. “We must not allow the Biden administration to tarnish that proud heritage by turning the U.S. Justice Department into a political shop devoted to settling scores for the current president.”
As part of a multistate amicus brief, Attorney General Rokita has asked the appeals court to uphold a district court’s order appointing a neutral special master and temporarily enjoining the Biden administration from utilizing a discrete subset of the documents seized for criminal investigative purposes.
The court, the brief states, should bear in mind “the extraordinary circumstance of a presidential administration ransacking the home of its one-time — and possibly future — political rival.”
The amicus brief is attached.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist [NYT]
“WASHINGTON — In the internet age, it’s almost impossible to get away with anything. (See: Adam Levine.)
And yet, some people still manage to pull off solo flights of destruction worthy of a megalomaniacal supervillain.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, long entwined, continue on vile parallel paths: They would rather destroy their countries than admit they have lost.\
They have each created a scrim of lies to justify lunatic personal ambition. And while it should be easy to see through these lies, both cult-of-personality leaders are able to con and bully enough people to remain puissant.”