You take a political disaster for your side — say your man has illegally taken classified documents, some very sensitive, after leaving the White House, and they caught him lying about it, they have the actual evidence.   Say he also has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due.  Say he also has a lifelong history of being transactional, doing anything to profit himself at the expense of suckers.   Somebody ratted to the FBI on him that he hadn’t returned all the classified documents his lawyers swore he turned over a month after the subpoena for the remainder of the documents.  Suppose empty top secret document folders were seized in a legal search, along with a hundred other unreturned classified documents.  The FBI search and seizure confirmed the probable cause that he had retained the illegally taken material.

Here’s what you do.  1) put the shoe on the other foot — why did the FBI take personal, private stuff that was mixed in with the classified documents?   That’s his stuff — why did the FBI seize HIS STUFF?   Explain that, FBI! DOJ!

2) the claims his lawyers came up with in federal court have never been litigated before, so you see, there are many complex legal issues that a team of genius lawyers has raised for the first time that will take a long time to analyze, though Judge Cannon did a brilliant job, under great time pressure.  Legally complex, since never litigated, you see?

3) the judge is only trying to provide transparecy, which is what the nation wants

4) The FBI taint team may have been tainted, because this is a partisan DOJ, unlike Bill Barr’s scrupulous DOJ

I only made it through the first two minutes, but I’m sure there are many more excellent examples of counterfactual “opinion” propaganda spread with an absolute straight face and an authoritative tone.  

The biggest question is what documents does F POTUS still have at Ivana’s private cemetery at Bedminster, at his Tower on Fifth Avenue, and who has paid big bucks, very big bucks, for some of the most valuable top secret intelligence and military information in the world?

Or, as Fox might put it, what right does the FBI have to take his personal collection of Playboy magazines just because there might have been a couple of empty classified document folders in there?

The real issue, aside from the DOJ’s suspicious lack of transparency, is why is the DOJ resisting a fair Special Master and meanwhile giving him the stuff they stole from him back and why are all these radical Left lawyers prejudging a case so complicated only the Supreme Court is really fit to rule on it? That’s why we need Special Master John Durham.

The brilliant, well-informed, cheerful Alison Gill has several very popular podcasts. I listen to the Daily Beans everyday, as essential as Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, in my opinion. Allison cuts to the chase, and is never afraid to call b*******, or use the word bullshit, or sometimes fucking bullshit (the Daily Beans is drily billed as “news with swearing”).

Allison does another podcast weekly, Cleanup on Aisle 45, with attorney Andrew Torrez. Torrez does not f****** swear, but he’s very fucking articulate and cut from the same cloth as Allison Gill. They recently analyzed lifetime federal judge Aileen Cannon’s ballsy but batshit crazy decision in Trump v Deep State Cucks. Allison called the episode “Loose Cannon”. You can hear the whole discussion at the link below, it’s fantastic.

https://megaphone.link/SHVA3925994146

I’ll give you the gist of it from notes I took while relistening just now.

Cannon argues in her ruling that even though the Trump defense team did not assert any grounds for the court’s jurisdiction or submit any evidence or sworn statements by anybody, she was asserting equitable jurisdiction over this oddly amateurish, one-off motion, brought specifically to her courtroom in Fort Pierce. Without jurisdiction a judge may not hear a case.

Equitable jurisdiction can only be found where there is some kind of inequity or unfairness that the law cannot otherwise address. The argument for equitable jurisdiction was not made by Trump’s lawyers, Cannon found it based solely on attorney argument at the hearing. This reticence to say anything under oath by lead attorney Jim Trusty, Torrez pointed out, was a clever move (in a corrupt judge’s courtroom) by F POTUS’s lawyers. Since attorney argument during hearings is not subject to the penalties of perjury (as an untruthful sworn court filing would be, and motions for equitable relief always depend on convincing sworn statements.) they left themselves free to throw things against the wall and see what the judge would make stick.

Cannon (who refused amicus briefs from conservatives opposing F POTUS’s motion, unheard of behavior from a judge) makes arguments in her ruling that Trump’s lawyers never raised in their idiosyncratic, frivolous filing. She applies the four Richey factors from a 1975 case where Mr. and Mrs. Richey sued the IRS to get back papers taken in a search. The appeals court in that case sets out what a moving party must show to get equitable relief in federal court in a pre-indictment case against the government.

The first and most important factor the moving party (movant) must show is that the government “displayed a callous disregard for the movant’s constitutional rights” (such as by deliberately not obtaining a legal search warrant prior to the search). Cannon admits this was not the case in the legal FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

But she then decided that factor number two weighed heavily in F POTUS’s favor, that he had a compelling interest in and need for the personal property seized.

Kind of counterfactual when it comes to all of the executive branch documents he was illegally hoarding. It was, of course, not his property.

The third factor is a showing of irreparable injury to the moving party, something else Trump’s lawyers did not allege in their dodgy papers. Allison reads some testimony from his lawyer Jim Trusty, a long time criminal defense attorney from a white shoe Washington DC boutique white collar criminal defense law firm, in response to this question from Cannon. Trusty mumbles and mutters and eventually comes up with a vague, and irrelevant, claim of “institutional harm”. Cannon takes this and runs with it, the harm is to Donald Trump’s reputation and good name, presumably as an honest man, great party leader, past and future president and a lucrative brand.

Lawyers for George W. Bush argued a better, though also asinine, irreparable harm to their client in Bush v Gore — if the recount wasn’t stopped and all the Florida votes were counted their client would suffer the irreparable injury of losing the 2000 presidential election. If you have unethical members of your legal fraternity deciding the case, you have a shot at that kind of bullshit flying. It worked like yer proverbial charm for Dubya and Cheney, with conflicted but unrecused Scalia and Thomas casting the deciding votes in the 5-4 one off ruling.

The fourth factor is whether or not there’s an adequate remedy at law for the grievance, like a regular appeal. In this case, ordinarily Trump would be able to raise Fourth Amendment defenses about the government search only once he was a defendant in a criminal trial. Here judge Cannon is allowing Donald Trump to delay the investigation of the evidence of a likely crime (and how many of these documents he’s already sold to Saudis, his friend in Moscow, and all the highest bidders all around the world is inpossible to guess) as he did in every previous investigation, baseless witch hunts all. He is, as we all know, a serial and habitual obstructer of justice. So Judge Cannon just tried to help him out here a little bit. And who could blame her?

In weighing the equitable interests on both sides, Cannon decided that F POTUS’s squishy irreparable reputational injury claim (made by her in the absence of any irreparable injury asserted by the guy’s experienced white shoe lawyer) outweighed the two interests of the executive branch argued by the DOJ 1)– that the seized papers are needed to conduct an ongoing criminal investigation, and, 2) that they are needed for an urgent National Security harm/threat assessment.

Cannon dismissed the DOJ’s argument that the papers have all already been reviewed by a taint team and that the few attorney/client and personal ones have already been set aside and would never be seen by investigators. She noted in her ruling that the FBI and DOJ are “not always perceived to be impartial” (deep state cucks) and that there is a “perception” that they are both biased against fucking F POTUS.

This argument has the same stink as Lyin’ Ted Cruz’s sneered January 5th claims, citing the perceptions of millions who honestly believed in the rigged, stolen election as the reason that an independent committee had to be appointed to investigate the voter fraud that could not be proved in dozens of federal lawsuits. The perception you understand, the perception, you fucking fuck!

For good measure Cannon also opined that the movant was likely to succeed on the merits of the case — that the goverment illegally took his property. The likelihood of sucess is a heavy factor in the granting of injunctive relief (a legal time out to avoid irreparable harm), even if manifestly, ridiculously untrue in this case (he’d have to prove he was the actual owner of all those government documents owned by the executive branch) but good enough for a Federalist Society lifetime appointee just showing loyalty and gratitude to her unblemished benefactor. Love you, boss!