Bloomberg has an article about the Trump-picked judge candidate for "special master" that the DOJ seems okay with.
1) He's served for 30 years and is retiring this year.
2) Reagan nominee.
3) As a district court judge, has the clearance necessary to review classified docouments.
4) This part:
In all fairness, if Team Trump picked nothing but cultist judges, the DOJ would never have bitten, and Cannon might have just given up entirely. Problem was, they may have gone too far the other way. Classic Republicans back Trump because they want his votes. This judge doesn't need votes.“Trump may think a Republican judge will help him, but it’s a big mistake to think that because Dearie is a Republican he’ll shade in favor of Trump in this case,” said Daniel R. Alonso, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who served as chief of the office’s criminal division from 2002 to 2005. “Dearie is not a good pick for Trump here, because he doesn’t tolerate nonsense.”
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So if you were to look for Trump news in the last 24 hours, Google would show you this:
Yeah, that's FOX News desperately trying to find a needle of good news in a haystack of "Trump is a criminal". I already cited that headline, I don't get another point for citing it twice. It is worth noting that, apparently, they haven't said much since.
The problem is, that unsealing has more info. FOX News is holding desperately onto "Trump gave more stuff back at first than we thought" which, again, still irrelevant, he still kept stolen property, he still lied about it. And it is that Insider article that goes into the lies that the unsealing demonstrates.
It is at this point where FOX News' spin and everyone else's pull apart, like the divergence in Fallout or the Cell Saga.New details from the affidavit used in the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago suggest that former President Donald Trump may have authorized a false statement his attorneys made to the DOJ, legal analysts said.
Experts zeroed in on a statement in the affidavit an attorney for Trump gave to investigators when they visited Mar-a-Lago to retrieve government records in June.
The details had previously been redacted, but were made public Tuesday on the order of a federal magistrate.
Now I'm going to need @cubby on this one, because we've discussed this topic before. Namely, the infuriating topic ofAccording to the newly-released information, one Trump attorney told the DOJ "he was not advised there were any records in any private office space or other locations in Mar-a-Lago."
A lawyer for Trump, Christina Bobb, also signed a statement saying that all of the information requested by the government had been handed back.
That information turned out to be false. When agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, they found stashes of highly confidential records, including in Trump's offices, haphazardly kept alongside his personal items.
Analysts say the new evidence indicates Trump himself was likely behind the attorneys false claims.
"There's more of an implication in this newly released information that the former president did play a role in the provision of information about documents to whoever the lawyer who certified this information to the Justice Department," Former US attorney Joyce Vance said in an interview on MSNBC.
"There's this implication that documents were stored in storage areas and that there was nothing in personal offices and that seems like the sort of information that would have been very likely to come from the former president."
David Laufman, the former Former Chief of DOJ's Counterintelligence Section, also said that Trump had likely fed his attorneys false information.
"I think it's more likely than not that he lied to them knowing that they were going to transmit those lies to the government," he said on MSNBC.
On Twitter, legal analyst Ryan Goodman reached the same conclusion.
"Most likely points to ... being advised by his client, Donald Trump," he said of the attorney's claim to investigators.
a) you lie to your lawyer
b) your lawyer passes that false information forward to a signed legal form, because the lawyer has no requirement to verify the information
c) no crime is committed.
I despise this chain of events. Now, there are counterpoints, which I hope cubby can further explain. Supposedly, a lawyer is ethically supposed to bail on a client that lies to them and causes this chain of events to unfold. Bobb hasn't. If they conspired, that's all of them up for perjury and obstruction of justice. But to date, nobody's been cited with anything for what we now know is an objective lie: Team Trump telling the DOJ they'd returned everything, when they had not.
And no, I'm not accepting "they forgot they had 15 boxes of the stuff, and somehow they missed it in their search". Classified folders are pretty obvious, even empty ones.
The above-cited experts are suggesting that Trump lied to his legal team. Subpoena-ing someone's lawyers is a big step, but may be mandatory here. Bobb has already gotten her own lawyer, the rest might (cough) follow suit.