Goldtent TA Paradise

TRUMP CARD !

1. Fullgoldcrown says:

   September 14, 2022 - 1:07 pm at 1:07 pm

   Trump’s lawyers and the DOJ have now traded feisty briefs on whether the judge should stay her order requiring a special master until the DOJ’s appeal runs its course. Which of course will be well after the FBI finishes doing whatever it is planning to do. But a spectacular opportunity is shaping up for President Trump, and if he planned it this way, he’s a genius.

   There’s a lot of great stuff in the briefs. President Trump’s brief persuasively argued that the president has sole authority to declassify whatever he wants; it even cited a very helpful Obama executive order reinforcing that authority. But I’m detecting a momentum, a momentum pushing toward a single legal issue, and that issue was neatly summarized by the DOJ in its reply brief, filed yesterday, which made this perfectly legitimate point:

   [Former President Trump’s] attempts to change the subject by holding out the possibility that he could have declassified some of the seized records and-or that he could have designated them as “personal” records fare no better. As already noted, Plaintiff [Trump] has now filed multiple lengthy submissions with the Court that stop short of asserting that he in fact took any of these actions with respect to any of the seized records, including those at issue in the stay motion.
   The DOJ is right. If President Trump wants to argue that the classified records he was keeping at Mar-a-Lago were declassified, he needs to say so, and say it clearly. At present, Trump is playing coy, one of his usual strategies, and is trolling the government by saying that he’s NOT saying he did declassify or didn’t declassify, but as far as the government knows, he DID.

   That kind of fence-sitting won’t hold up forever. In fact, it’s probably not going to hold up for very much longer at all, now that the DOJ has explicitly called him out. The judge can see this issue looming on the judicial horizon just like I can. It’s the key to the entire case. I wouldn’t be surprised if the judge sets a special trial just to determine whether the records are or are not declassified.

   So so this could quickly and finally produce a miraculous victory for Trump, not just in the case but against the entire Deep State, a definitive victory once again snatched right out of the jagged jaws of defeat. We know that, shortly before he left office, Trump had proposed to declassify a bunch of records relating to Russiagate and other FBI corruption. He sent those records to the FBI so they could offer redactions of anything that would harm U.S. interests. But the FBI slow-walked their response until Trump was out of office.

   Sorry!

   It is not unreasonable to assume the records snatched by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago were the very same ones Trump proposed to declassify: the evidence of FBI corruption (and maybe a lot more) in the Russiagate papers, at least.

   So Trump has been trapped in a weird middle ground. Were the records declassified even though the FBI never completed its redactions? Was Trump’s act of requesting the redactions merely a courtesy, and not a requirement for redaction? These are unsettled questions. Trump can’t — shouldn’t — release those documents until a court says they’re declassified, or they COULD lock him up.

   But to get a judge to issue a “declaration” of a party’s rights — like the rights of a former president to publish declassified records — there must a REAL and PRESENT dispute over those rights, not just a hypothetical dispute. This may not make sense to non-lawyers, but judges may not give pure ‘advisory opinions.’

   In other words, the only way Trump could have gotten this issue in front of a judge, the issue of whether the records ARE IN FACT declassified, was to pick a fight with someone over it. I have no idea whether the Trump team planned it this way, but it could not have possibly played out any better than it has. If Trump had been the one to instigate a dispute, it would have almost certainly been heard in D.C., where all the agencies are located, and where the deck is completely stacked against the 45th president.

   To get the issue into an unbiased jurisdiction, Trump had to get someone ELSE to start the fight, in a place where he could fight on neutral ground. Where better than Florida?

   Because the FBI raided Trump in Florida, starting a case there, and because the DOJ has now called the issue out, the decision over the records’ classified status will be heard in Florida, the inevitable appeal will travel to the 11th Circuit, and then it will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

   I will skinny out onto a thin branch and predict Trump is likely to win in all three courts. If he’d started in D.C., he would’ve lost twice — at the D.C. federal court and then the D.C. appeals court — and then the Supreme Court would’ve had the odious and unwanted duty of overturning both lower courts. If it had played out this way, the corporate media would have trumpeted the Supreme Court decision as more evidence of out-of-control judicial activism, and the whole thing would have looked illegitimate.

   All that noise would have distracted from the real story, which is the Deep State’s corruption, exposed by the declassified records.

   Trump’s lawyers know a lot more than I do. I might be missing something. But the strategy now looks crystal clear to me. All Trump has to do now is say the magic words, “I DID declassify those records,” and the judge can set the matter for a showdown in Florida.

   I know it sounds weird, but this could be the best thing that ever happened to Trump. Thanks, DOJ!

2. pedro_deleon says:

   September 14, 2022 - 2:14 pm at 2:14 pm

   Love the game theory take on matters like these.
   You are out of your league in realms like this if you aren’t thinking tactically.

3. dadoc1 says:

   September 14, 2022 - 3:38 pm at 3:38 pm

   Trump won’t be allowed to become president again. The question will be to what lengths the powers that be will go to achieve this and how blatant it will seem to the public.