The problem is, with each argument Trump makes, the more he implicates himself. These convoluted arguments are a waste of court time and I’m surprised they haven’t already reprimanded his counsel for trying to create fake arguments in a vain effort to find a loophole.
At some point, he not only loses these arguments and attempts at stonewalling in court, but he also is in a sense “speaking” by doing so. He should remain silent and let his lawyers work the case, but he hires complicit yes-men hacks, green lawyers unqualified for a case of this magnitude and a client likely to sink the whole ship. If he’s arguing these are his documents or that he’s entitled to them, he’s admitted to taking them. That’s a crime, period. They are not his and he is not entitled to them, and obstructing and lying isn’t going to help him at all.
I think the government may be fixin' to get Judge Cannon reprimanded for ever having issued any part of her original ruling. On their way to getting the whole thing gone.
You're right that Trump is wasting their time. He's in so deep now that the government is citing stuff from cases they won against Richard Nixon -- and Nixon was still a
sitting President at the time.
Trump is either too desperate or too stupid to realize that putting up arguments about crap like executive privileges after he lacks related standing is just asking for at least an obstruction of justice charge.
His earlier counsel latched on to some of the executive privilege questions because they may remain somewhat untested, regarding post-WH status and former presidents wanting to hold back certain notes or documents, but the idiots didn't consider what kind of documents they were talking about.
As the latest government filing asserts, there are situations where no question of privilege could possibly take precedence over the government's retention of seized material, particularly where the issue was Trump's very possession of such documents at all, once having departed office, and especially after he had been subpoenaed for them and had even asserted he had returned stuff when that was not true.
We're not talking about sarcastic
thank you for the nice evening notes from Angela Merkel or such, e.g. the kind of thing that some historians love to find in National Archive records and that presidents might prefer just to hang onto as souvenirs.
The documents marked classified had been identified as stratosphere-level and restricted-distribution, with zero reason for a former president to have exported them... and probably even less reason even to have thought about declassifying them. The government wants to go through them for any
patterns in their content or type-- so they can maybe clarify how much and what kind of jeopardy this guy Trump may have created for the USA.
I hope the DoJ sticks it to him. I'm all for due process but not for this level of horsefeathers.
www.cnn.com
