American Greatness By Julie Kelly 9/19/2022
It’s all just another campaign of deceit—with reliable assistance from the national news media—to get Trump.With one sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon spoke for the majority of Americans who no longer have faith in the nation’s top law enforcement agency. “It is also true, of course, that even-handed procedure does not demand unquestioning trust in the determinations of the Department of Justice,” she wrote in her September 15 order denying the government’s request to prevent a third-party review of allegedly “classified” documents seized by the FBI during the raid of Mar-a-Lago last month.
At issue is the validity of claims made by prosecutors that roughly 100 records taken in the unprecedented pillage of a former president’s home on August 8 have classified markings and therefore do not belong to him. The kerfuffle began earlier this year when the Justice Department acted on a criminal referral by the national archivist, who accused Trump of unlawfully keeping classified material at his home.
Although Trump’s representatives cooperated with investigators for months, Attorney General Merrick Garland nonetheless authorized the nine-hour raid conducted by at least a dozen FBI agents resulting in the seizure of more than 11,000 pieces of evidence, including personal items such as books, medical files, tax information, apparel, and passports.
And his office has been backpedaling ever since.
The reason is that Garland’s henchmen ran into a buzzsaw named Judge Cannon. Trump filed a lawsuit seeking a court-appointed special master after requests for an impartial arbiter were denied by the government for two weeks. “The FBI and DOJ have demonstrated a willingness to treat President Trump differently than any other citizen,” Trump’s lawyers accurately argued on August 22. “[In] light of recent FBl behavior when President Trump is a part of its aim, this Court should feel obliged to demand candor and transparency, and not just ‘trust us’ assertions from DOJ.”
It appears Cannon needed little convincing. Although self-proclaimed legal “experts” mocked the lawsuit as dead-on-arrival, Cannon torched that groupthink when she announced a few days later her intent to consider Trump’s motion due to the “exceptional circumstances” of the matter. A federal prosecutor for seven years, Cannon, 40, undoubtedly watched the Justice Department’s rapid descent from a trusted government institution to a brazen enforcement arm of the Democratic Party before Trump appointed her to the bench in 2020.
In the past few weeks, Cannon has exposed a number of errors and falsehoods related to the criminal investigation into Trump for violating the Espionage Act, obstructing justice, and concealing government property—and she’s pulled no punches when it comes to her former employer.
Her blistering September 5 order finalizing the appointment of a special master revealed that the government absconded with “personal effects without evidentiary value” and at least 500 pages of privileged communications, a trove the Justice Department downplayed as a “limited subset” of evidence. (A heavily redacted version of the search warrant gave FBI agents wide berth, allowing investigators to take anything within close proximity of papers containing so-called “classification markings.”)
More:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/19/justice-department-desperate-to-conceal-classified-records/
