As most readers know, the FBI raided Donald Trump's palatial Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, an unprecedented action against a former president, in order to steal some documents he took with him when he left the White House.
Presidents past have all done as much; Bill Clinton, for instance, took audiotapes with him and kept them in his sock drawer, and when lawsuits to compel him to hand them over to the National Archives failed, he was allowed to keep them. They were 'his,' a federal court ruled at the time, not the property of the Office of the President and, therefore, We the People. But of course, the rules in D.C. are different if your last name is Trump.
In any event, Biden was asked by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy how much, if any, advance notice he had of the raid on Trump's Palm Beach home.
“I didn’t have any advanced notice. None, zero, not one single bit," he claimed on Aug. 24.
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Well, either Biden is lying, or the federal judge who granted Trump's request for a special master to review the documents taken by the FBI to see if they qualify for attorney-client or executive privilege is not being truthful.
According to an excerpt of U.S. District Judge from the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen M. Cannon's order, posted by The Conservative Treehouse, Biden not only knew about the upcoming raid, he specifically authorized it while also personally denying Trump's prior claims of executive privilege -- because again, the rules in the swamp Trump wanted to drain don't apply to him or, more accurately, he is held to a much different standard:
Page #2 and Page #3 of Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling cites a quote from the DOJ own legal filing, dated May 10th, that Joe Biden ordered the National Archives and Records Administration to provide access to the FBI to review the Trump records. Note the quotation marks:
On May 10, 2022, NARA informed Plaintiff that it would proceed with “provid[ing] the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as Thursday, May 12, 2022.”
Cannon ordered the independent third party be appointed to “review the seized property, manage assertions of privilege and make recommendations thereon, and evaluate claims for return of property.”
“The Court hereby authorizes the appointment of a special master to review the seized property for personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorney- client and/or executive privilege,” the order goes on to say.
“Furthermore, in natural conjunction with that appointment, and consistent with the value and sequence of special master procedures, the Court also temporarily enjoins the Government from reviewing and using the seized materials for investigative purposes pending completion of the special master’s review or further Court order,” it adds.
The order, though, “shall not impede the classification review and/or intelligence assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (“ODNI”) as described in the Government’s Notice of Receipt of Preliminary Order.”
One former federal prosecutor specializing in national security issues thinks Trump caught a huge break.
“It’s a big win for the Trump team and a potentially explosive ruling if it holds. I would imagine it’s important enough that the government will appeal this immediately,” Andrew McCarthy told Fox News on Monday after the ruling.
“In a nutshell, what happened here is the Justice Department assumed that Trump only had attorney-client privilege, that he did not have executive privilege, or at least to the limited extent that as a former president he maintains executive privilege, it can’t be asserted against the executive branch itself,” McCarthy said.
“It’s one thing for the government to have that theory, I think it actually may be a sound theory. The problem is it’s not 100% settled, so I thought it was incumbent on them to get a ruling from the court on that question before they hauled off and did what they did, which was have the privilege team go through all the seized documents assuming that Trump only had attorney-client privilege and then allowing all of the potentially executive privileged documents to go to the prosecution team,” he added.
“If it turned out they are privileged, that could taint the prosecutors who reviewed them and it could also taint their investigation because they are now conducting an investigation,” he argued.
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Our government is completely compromised and no longer legitimate.
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