Former’s latest profile President Donald TrumpYour legal team is more of a “pretend” children’s game than a legal filing.
Trump’s attorneys filed in response Special Master Raymond Dearie asked Trump and the DOJ to brief him on the so-called “global issues“In this case, it means broad legal issues that could help guide Dearie’s slogan through the thousands of documents recovered during an FBI search warrant executed at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump.
Trump’s lawyers have apparently interpreted “global” as a license to make legal arguments so widely that they would make the Presidential Records Act (PRA) as well as legal doctrines such as specials. executive power becomes meaningless.
A good example of childlike “let’s pretend” in the case of Trump is debate that the PRA could not apply to any of the documents he had obtained because they were personal documents. Trump briefly cited the PRA requiring that “documents created or received by the President…, to the extent practicable, be classified as Presidential or personal records as they are obtained.” created or received” but concluded that Trump had not taken any steps to classify the documents. documents just as he classified the documents as personal documents.
Such a conclusion would eliminate PRA altogether and replace the “whatever the president thinks” theory as the law that preserves our national history. If this sounds familiar, chances are you remembering Trump’s claim that he could declassify documents just by “thinking about it.”
Same concept: “just pretend.”
The legal doctrine of executive privilege is treated similarly. Recall that executive privilege is meant to protect the Board’s advice and considerations from unnecessary disclosure; so obviously documents that are purely personal by definition don’t fall into this category.
However, Trump argued that only in the event that the Special Master decides that the documents obtained by Trump are not personal documents will they be protected by executive privilege.
Trump’s lawyers call this an alternative argument. It cannot. That is an inconsistent argument. The fact that the documents would be personal — newspaper clippings or mementos, for example — would make them unlikely to fall under executive privilege. This is how Trump’s lawyers explain that: “Simply put, assuming… that the documents are not designated as personal documents during the Presidency of the Plaintiff, they should be treated as Presidential documents protected by executive privilege. France.”
There is no discussion of how the similarities that make documents merely private can make them privileged documents. In other words, if the documents are not personal, just pretend they are privileged documents.
The Department of Justice doesn’t believe in fabrication when it comes to search warrants and criminal prosecutions. In their November 8, 2022 filing, which has just been sealed, the DOJ argues that Trump “cannot argue that a document is ‘entirely private or non-public’ under PRA while at the same time being states, as a backup, that it reflects confidential executive communications.” Surname featured Trump’s alternative arguments that the documents he obtained were personal or executive privilege documents were a “cover game” and a “special boss shouldn’t indulge in.”
But buried in this back and forth between Trump’s legal team and the DOJ are two growing threats to Trump.
The first threat arises from the DOJ’s attempt to get Trump to file an affidavit confirming or denying the accuracy of the Mar-a-Lago archive. Such an affidavit is likely to negate Trump’s assertions that the FBI produced the documents.
The second threat is for the DOJ to request the lifting of any restrictions on its use of any material that is not deemed privileged under attorney-client or executive privilege. The DOJ’s summary states “the classification of the records in question as Presidential or personal ultimately does not affect the government’s ability to use and review them for criminal investigation purposes.” .”
It’s a stark reminder to Trump that all his fake arguments will eventually disappear in the face of a criminal case because you can’t pretend to get away with an indictment.
