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Jack Smith Tracks Unhinged Origin of Judge Cannon's Latest Trump Defense
The founder of Judicial Watch is NOT a lawyer. This idiot is one who came up with the idiotic concept that the Presidential Records Act protects TFG. This position is based on the fact that Bill Clinton beat Judicial Watch on a case involving private tapes done for a memoir that were clearly not Presidential Records. Judicial Watch and its leaders are idiots.
Link to tweet
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jack-smith-tracks-unhinged-origin-of-judge-cannons-latest-trump-defense
In his latest counterattack, Special Counsel Jack Smith has revealed how deeply sourced his Donald Trump investigation has become, meticulously detailing for the first time how a farfetched legal theory traveled from a conservative activist to the MAGA-friendly federal judge who is employing it in a manner that could save the former president who appointed her.
In his late night Tuesday court filing, federal prosecutors did more than slam U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s flawed reasoning that would essentially hand Trump a total victory in the case against him for hoarding national secrets at his South Florida oceanside estate of Mar-a-Lago.
The specially assigned Department of Justice team also mapped out the origin of Trump’s latest defense, the idea that he was justified in keeping hundreds of classified documents after leaving the White House because he considered these government records “personal.”......
Fitton’s perspective was informed by the way he tried to acquire audio recordings of historian Taylor Branch’s interviews with former President Bill Clinton for his 2009 book, The Clinton Tapes. The National Archives claimed it didn’t have the recordings, and U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately decided she couldn’t force the agency to deem Branch’s tapes as official government documents—especially if Clinton considered them “personal.”
“The decision to segregate personal materials from presidential records is made by the president, during the president's term and in his sole discretion,” Jackson wrote in 2012.
Fast forward a decade, and Fitton was fuming that Trump couldn’t do the same with the paperwork he ferried from the White House to Mar-a-Lago......
And they stressed that Trump hasn’t even formally asserted that he even deemed these stacks of government paperwork as his own belongings, merely floating the idea instead. Prosecutors derided the whole concocted theory as “Trump’s post hoc legal invention.”
“Importantly, Trump has never represented to this Court that he in fact designated the classified documents as personal,” Bratt wrote, noting that Trump’s legal team didn’t even bring it up at a court hearing last month “despite every opportunity and every incentive to do so.”
“The reason is simple: he never did so,” he wrote. “Instead, he has attempted to fashion out of whole cloth a legal presumption that would operate untethered to any facts—without regard to his actual decisions, his actual intent, the unambiguous definition of what constitutes personal records under the PRA, or the plainly non-personal content of the highly classified documents that he retained.”
In his late night Tuesday court filing, federal prosecutors did more than slam U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s flawed reasoning that would essentially hand Trump a total victory in the case against him for hoarding national secrets at his South Florida oceanside estate of Mar-a-Lago.
The specially assigned Department of Justice team also mapped out the origin of Trump’s latest defense, the idea that he was justified in keeping hundreds of classified documents after leaving the White House because he considered these government records “personal.”......
Fitton’s perspective was informed by the way he tried to acquire audio recordings of historian Taylor Branch’s interviews with former President Bill Clinton for his 2009 book, The Clinton Tapes. The National Archives claimed it didn’t have the recordings, and U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately decided she couldn’t force the agency to deem Branch’s tapes as official government documents—especially if Clinton considered them “personal.”
“The decision to segregate personal materials from presidential records is made by the president, during the president's term and in his sole discretion,” Jackson wrote in 2012.
Fast forward a decade, and Fitton was fuming that Trump couldn’t do the same with the paperwork he ferried from the White House to Mar-a-Lago......
And they stressed that Trump hasn’t even formally asserted that he even deemed these stacks of government paperwork as his own belongings, merely floating the idea instead. Prosecutors derided the whole concocted theory as “Trump’s post hoc legal invention.”
“Importantly, Trump has never represented to this Court that he in fact designated the classified documents as personal,” Bratt wrote, noting that Trump’s legal team didn’t even bring it up at a court hearing last month “despite every opportunity and every incentive to do so.”
“The reason is simple: he never did so,” he wrote. “Instead, he has attempted to fashion out of whole cloth a legal presumption that would operate untethered to any facts—without regard to his actual decisions, his actual intent, the unambiguous definition of what constitutes personal records under the PRA, or the plainly non-personal content of the highly classified documents that he retained.”