Donald Trump will go down in history, among many other things, as the only US president thus far to literally steal top-secret government documents from the White House after he lost the election that he still delusionally refuses to accept, stashed them away at his golf club where he now crashes after he got kicked out of the Executive Mansion, then lied about having said documents so many times that the Justice Department was forced to send the FBI in to essentially kick his door down and take them, only to then turn around and literally sue the United States federal government for taking back the stolen highly-classified documents that belong to them in the first place.
Literally, it’s the sort of thing you couldn’t make up if you sat down and tried to. It’s the sort of thing that no one could ever, in their wildest dreams, expect to actually live through, until you do.
And to make matters that much worse, Trump managed to so heavily stack this country with his own allies and jockeys — from coast to coast, from Congress to the courts — that he’s not only managed to get away with this lawsuit against the literal federal government, he’s managed to secure himself a judge on the case that will ensure that pretty much every single ask or move he makes will go in his favor.
As we’re all painfully aware by now, Trump’s hand-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, has been assigned to the ex-president’s lawsuit against the US government and has seemingly made it her life’s mission to grant (almost) Trump’s every whim and wish — including his unhinged demand that a so-called “Special Master” be appointed to review all of the documents Trump stole that were seized from his estate and his ability to play a large role in hand-picking who that Special Master turned out to be.
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But yet, here we are, with all of Trump’s ridiculous demands being met at every turn, and yet the man and his team are apparently still refusing to cooperate.
According to a new court filing that went public today, Donald Trump’s legal team has refused to comply with requests from Judge Raymond Dearie, the appointed Special Master on the case, to turn over any information they may have in relation to the ex-president’s claims that he declassified all of the top-secret information found at his resort before taking it from the White House.
A court filing from the Special Master shows that Dearie requested elaboration on their declassification claims, but Trump Team dismissed this notion, instead claiming that there would be a “time and place” for that.
“Otherwise, the Special Master process will have forced the Plaintiff to fully and specifically disclose a defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment without such a requirement being evident in the District Court’s order,” the court filing from Trump’s attorneys reads.
On the heels of the news Andrew Weissmann, who once served as a prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller, predicted that Trump and his team are on the brink of launching a smear campaign against the judge that they played a large hand in choosing as their Special Master.
“Dearie’s response to Trump saying it can’t answer as its a possible trial defense is going to be: either you are saying it now or you are not. If you do not now want to claim your declassified docs that is fine, and your choice, but then the docs are not being returned to you,” Weissmann said.
He went on to theorize that the Trump team will be “ruing the day it proposed Judge Dearie and appalled he is asking for their position on declassification.”
“As sure as the night follows the day, the next Trump tactic will be denigrating Dearie publicly and asking Cannon to clip his wings.”
Attorneys for the US Justice Department shot back in response to the Trump Team court filing, “Plaintiff principally seeks to raise questions about the classification status of the records and their categorization under the Presidential Records Act (‘PRA’). But plaintiff does not actually assert — much less provide any evidence — that any of the seized records bearing classification markings have been declassified.”
“Such possibilities should not be given weight absent plaintiff’s putting forward competent evidence,” the DOJ fired back.
Read the full court filing here.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
