Based on many of the moves and decisions made by Special Master Raymond Dearie in the Mar-a-Lago document scandal — after he was hand-chosen for the position by Donald Trump and his legal team following the ex-president’s demands that were shamelessly met by Trump-appointed Judge Cannon — we were becoming hopeful that Dearie was shaping up to be far less sycophantic to the sandal-ridden ex-president than we’re sure Trump was hoping for. However, Dearie’s most recent ruling has left us with a pit in our stomachs and our heads spinning, as Forbes now reports on a 3-page ruling delivered by the Special Master this week, that will effectively force the US Department of Justice to return some of the documents seized by FBI agents from the Palm Beach estate back to the former president who stole them from the White House.
“U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, the third-party special master reviewing the documents seized at Mar-A-Lago, ordered Friday for some original documents to be returned to Trump by October 10, noting both the DOJ and Trump team agreed they could be given back,” the publication reports on the unsettling ruling.
Forbes goes on to note that inventory lists, which were very temporarily and inadvertently unsealed online, only to subsequently be deleted, showed that the US federal government had offered to return the documents to the former president on the 30th of August.
The publication reports, “nstead, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon used those nongovernmental documents as a justification for the special master to be appointed, noting on September 5 that the filter team said there were materials like ‘medical documents, correspondence related to taxes and accounting information.’ The DOJ said in the filing that those documents ‘do not appear to be privileged,’ and are ‘all either legal in nature . . . or otherwise potentially sensitive’ and do not appear to be presidential records, government documents or at all classified.”
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Again, Judge Aileen Cannon, who is on the Mar-a-Lago document case, was appointed to her position by none other than Donald Trump himself.
“Among the approximately 300 pages of documents to be returned, according to the filing, are a letter from Trump’s physician from 2016; documents related to various Trump-related lawsuits; accounting and tax documents; a confidential settlement agreement between the PGA and Trump Golf; invoices for legal fees; the email accepting Trump’s resignation from the Screen Actors Guild; a draft nondisclosure agreement; and a signed letter from a Trump legal advisor to the Biden campaign,” Forbes writes.
It certainly seems that more and more of the corruption is coming to light, as things move forward.
Read the full report from Forbes here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
