Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 31 2022 10:41pm)
Again, its a procedural motion on appointing a special master. The legal merits aren't at question. This isn't even a pretrial motion, there's no case.
And as laid out in their motion, not only did Trump's team cooperate with the requests from the DoJ when not required to do so under NARA, the DoJ has failed to make any contact at all with Trump's counsel over reviewing attorney-client privileged documents, despite leaking information to the media for photo ops. And on top of that, when the judge said they were inclined to grant the special master review of documents to protect privilege, the DoJ tried to short circuit the court's authority by simultaneously claiming that their review was expedited and finished before the judge could rule and that any review by the judge would violate the government's intelligence review, all despite the fact that this privilege review team never actually got any input on what was privileged.
Its a bad faith run around a court, the kind that ornery old judges tend to reward with a judicious slapdown and activist pipsqueak judges just handwave. Judge says "I'll grant relief from X", DoJ says "We'll do X so fast you can't relieve it, also trust us we did it fairly without any safeguards or required review or contact in a first-ever motion that ignores all normal protocols"
Kind of ironic that we've got people above trying to dismiss Trump's claim of "I declassified it by a standing order" because it wasn't formal, whereas here the DoJ is saying "trust us bros we finished this review that we said we a special master would impede, except we didn't take any of the required steps and didn't allow any claims of privilege in a review of privilege claims". So I guess the DoJ is just allowed to say "I said these documents aren't privileged because I say so"
your pretty close to chopstikz and Ru atm