Never Trump And The Special Master

As reported by CNN,

A federal judge threw a wrench Monday in the Justice Department investigation into potential mishandling of documents from former President Donald Trump's White House by granting his request for a special master to review evidence seized from his Florida home last month.

The win for Trump temporarily prevents the Justice Department's investigative team from accessing the thousands of documents -- some of which are marked as classified -- taken from Mar-a-Lago.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon cleared the way for a third-party attorney to review all the seized materials, not just for documents covered by attorney-client privilege -- the circumstance in which special masters are usually used -- but also for potential executive privilege concerns, a move the Justice Department has said would be "unprecedented."

Good news for Trump, right? Well, not so fast! Never Trumper Andrew McCarthy at the National Review manages not just a glass-half-empty take on the development, but more like a glass-not-there-at-all. McCarthy's NR piece is behind a paywall, but the rabidly never Trump Hot Air blog gives us a glimpse:

Trump dragged his feet in seeking the special master, to the point that DOJ had nearly completed its privilege review by the time he finally filed his court action. Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the district court in 2020, inexplicably allowed nine days to elapse after first signaling her inclination to appoint a special master, during which she wrung her hands about whether to order the appointment and, more significantly, failed to rule on Trump’s application for a court-ordered suspension of the Justice Department’s review process and directive that DOJ cease using documents Trump claimed were privileged in furtherance of its criminal investigation.

So, inexplicably, a bumbling, procrastinating Trump somehow convinces a dithering, oblivious, non-feasant judge to throw the Mar-a-Lago probe into chaos, which is bad news all around -- and I'm not sure if McCarthy has his facts right, because based on CNN's account, the ruling "temporarily prevents the Justice Department's investigative team from accessing the thousands of documents", which as far as I can tell means the DOJ must "cease using" those documents until a special master reviews them.

And CNN's metaphor of "threw a wrench" is actually milder than McCarthy's characterization that the judge threw the DOJ incvestigation "into chaos". Isn't it odd that such a preening, ineffectual, narcissistic rogue should somehow win a substantial victory in court? And the subtext from McCarthy and others like William Barr is that the DOJ investigation is fully justified and constitutional, and as McCarthy put it in the New York Post on August 31, there's a there there:

The court filing made by the Justice Department on Tuesday night, in response to Trump’s lawsuit seeking a special master to review materials seized by the FBI, indicates that prosecutors have amassed formidable evidence of obstruction. That’s a game-changer.

As I explained in The Post last week, "The Justice Department typically takes very seriously any tampering with witnesses or evidence." Moreover, if it turned out that the FBI had damning "proof of attempts to conceal or destroy government records, especially highly classified ones," that would amount to criminal conduct that is virtually always prosecuted.

But as far as anyone can surmise at this point, the basis for the Mar-a-Lago raid was that n boxes of random artifacts had been gathered up from the residential quarters by White House housekeeping staff in the final hours of Trump's term. These were sealed and moved to a locked storage room under video surveillance at Mar-a-Lago. From what has emerged in unsealed receipts, the artifacts consisted largely of old magazines and newspapers, among which documents that had been marked classified were sometimes interleaved, although their presence in the White House residence, from which they were taken by housekeepers, was fully authorized.

During subsequent negotiations, Trump returned roughly half of those boxes to the National Archives. There is no indication that he himself had any interest in what was in the boxes, undertook any personal review of their contents, or attempted to destroy anything that was in them. This is pure surmise by figures like McCarthy and Barr, driven by a strange and near obsessive animosity toward Trump.

I'm also puzzled at McCarthy's sudden impatience with the legal system. Trump "dragged his feet". (The raid took place August 8; Trump's petition for a special master was filed August 22, exactly two weeks.) The judge "allowed nine days to elapse". I've got to say that although I'm not an attorney, I've learned enough about the law that things often move slowly. Very slowly. Judges take weeks and months to issue rulings as a matter of course -- nine days is fast. McCarthy as a former US Attorney must recognize this at some level. The Mar-a-Lago raid was, after all, intended to come as an early-morning surprise for Trump, whom the prosecutors knew would be out of town. It took Trump exactly two weeks to assemble a legal team to respond and develop a strategy, which McCarthy himself says has now thrown the prosecutors' case into chaos.

I understand the never Trumpers' position less and less. The one observation that can be made of Trump as an amateur newcomer to this highest-stakes political game is that he's actually acquitted himself pretty well in it from the start. His handling of the Mar-a-Lago case reflects that, at least so far. The anger of the never-Trumpers reflects that as well, it seems to me.