As I have shown, had Judge Aileen Cannon left well enough alone, the government would have handed all Category B documents identified by the filter team back to Trump on September 1. Instead, she deliberately inflicted what she herself deemed to be further harm on Trump to justify intervening in the search of Trump’s beach resort.

And now she may have caused even more harm. That’s because, by means that are not yet clear (but are likely due to a fuck-up by one of Cannon’s own staffers), the inventories from both Category A (government documents that deal with a legal issue) and Category B (more personal documents) were briefly posted on the docket. (h/t Zoe Tillman, who snagged a copy)

Those inventories not only show Cannon’s claims of injury to Trump were even more hackish than I imagined. But it creates the possibility that DOJ’s filter team will attempt to retain some of the documents included in Category B, notably records pertaining to the Georgia fraud attempts and January 6, they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Start with the hackishness. The harm that Cannon sustained to justify intervening consisted of preventing DOJ from returning, “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information” to Trump, “depriv[ing Trump]of potentially significant personal documents.” Cannon made DOJ withhold such documents from Trump for a least two additional weeks and then used it to argue that Trump had a personal interest in what DOJ claims are mostly government documents and press clippings.

The single solitary medical document pertaining to Trump (there’s a Blue Cross explanation of benefits that appears to pertain to someone else) is this letter from Trump’s then-personal physician released during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Not only was it publicly released over six years ago, but details of medicines left off the report and Trump’s role in dictating an earlier version of the letter were widely reported in 2017.

Aileen Cannon held up a national security investigation into highly sensitive documents stored insecurely at a beach resort targeted by foreign intelligence services, in part, because the FBI seized a public letter than had been released as part of a political campaign six years ago.

She personally halted efforts to keep the United States safe, in part, to prevent leaks of a document that Trump released himself six years ago.

But that’s not all she did.

There are documents in both Category A and Category B that may be responsive to subpoenas from the January 6, the DOJ investigation, and Fani Willis’ Georgia investigation.

The December 31, 2020 email from Kurt Hilbert pertaining to Fulton County lawsuits is likely the one investigators turned over to the filter team on September 26 (which Trump’s lawyers claim is privileged).

For some unknown reason (probably that it was sent to the White House, which DOJ considers a waiver of privilege), DOJ put it in Category A.

There are several uninteresting Georgia-related documents included among Category B documents — the Civil Complaint in Trump v. Kemp, retainer agreements pertaining to various Fulton County lawsuits, a retention agreement with Veen, O’Neill, Hartshorn, and Levin, along with another folder with retention agreements pertaining to Fulton County. But this file, including a letter to Kurt Hilbert with a post-it note from Cleta Mitchell, might be more interesting.

There’s also a document pertaining to Joe DiGenova regarding appointing a Special Counsel (as well as might be an effort to get Pat Cipollone to complain about Saturday Night Live’s taunts of Trump).

The DiGenova document might pertain to any number of topics, but like Cleta Mitchell, he has been named in DOJ subpoenas on election fraud.

Similarly, there are documents that might be responsive to and of interest to Tish James in her investigation of Trump’s fraud. Those include:

• 5 copies of the same one-page letter from Morgan Lewis about taxes
• A document about a restrictive covenant agreement
• A confidential settlement between the PGA and Trump Golf
• Several IRS Form 872s, including one in a folder marked NYC 8/10 (the date of Trump’s deposition with Tish James)
• An IRS Form 2858 with Molly’s name on it (almost certainly Molly Michael)
• A signed tax return disclosure consent form

The desk drawer also includes details of Alina Habba’s retention agreements and payments, which she would have found when she searched the drawers to ensure there were not tax documents in there.

The tax documents are likely uninteresting. Some (especially the Hilbert documents) may already be in investigators hands. But the point remains: By preventing DOJ from turning over these Category B documents to Trump on September 1 like they requested permission to do, Cannon has now given DOJ an opportunity to argue these document are not privileged, possibly even that they’re responsive to various subpoenas that might be crime-fraud excepted.

With the exception of the Hilbert emails to the White House, DOJ may still return these — fighting over them may be more trouble than it’s worth. But because this inventory got released, it will now be clear what Trump’s lawyers are attempting to hide. It may even give James or Willis opportunity to subpoena the documents anew.

And it will be clear that Aileen Cannon endangered the United States, in part, based off a claim that a medical record that Trump himself released six years ago is more important than some of the government’s most sensitive documents.

As Tillman noted in her piece on the inventory, there are also details of some of the clemency packages Trump reviews. Those include pardons for Rod Blagojevich, what are probably two Border Patrol agents convicted for shooting a drug smuggler, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, and Michael Behanna, a soldier courtmartialed for killing an Iraqi prisoner, as well as the commutation of Ted Suhl. There’s also one for an “RN” that might be Ronen Nahamani, whose clemency a bipartisan group of politicians supported, including Matt Gaetz. The inclusion of all these clemency packages makes it more likely that Roger Stone’s was among them — though by description, Stone’s pardon was in another drawer of a desk in Trump’s office.

One of the other main categories of Category A documents are letters to NARA, something likely covered by the part of the warrant authorizing the seizure of communications about classified records.

Judge Anthony Trenga has issued his order on John Durham’s omnibus motion in limine in the Igor Danchenko case which was — as the equivalent motion was in the Michael Sussmann case — a last desperate bid to turn a false statements trial into a conspiracy theory.

On all the most substantive issues, including whether Durham will be able to fly a German Ritz Hotel staffer in to testify about the pee tape, which is not charged, Trenga ruled against Durham.

His rulings include:

• That the pee tape allegations are not intrinsic to the charged crimes and the confusing and prejudicial nature of the claims would outweigh any probative value of the story
• Unless Durham can prove that Danchenko gave Steele the information on Millian that ties him to the pee tape, prosecutors can’t introduce utterly equivocal answers Danchenko gave to the FBI that a pee tape source could be Millian
• Durham can introduce evidence that Danchenko told Charles Dolan he worked for Steele (though the communications in question show primarily that Dolan knew it), but he can’t introduce evidence showing that Danchenko told others he worked for Steele
• The only reason to introduce an email to a business associate would be as impermissible evidence of bad character; it is not sufficiently related to the charges against Danchenko to be admitted under 404(b)
• An email Sergei Millian sent on July 26, 2016 can be admitted (I’ve shown that it reflects Millian coming back from Asia earlier than he otherwise would have), but two emails from 2020 are inadmissible hearsay because by then, “Millian certainly possessed motive and opportunity to misrepresent his thoughts”
• Durham cannot introduce the details of the 2009 counterintelligence investigation into Danchenko because to introduce those details would require hearsay, and the details themselves would not be all that useful to proving the case against Danchenko but would be very prejudicial
• Trenga will rule on evidence pertaining to the reliability or credibility of Durham’s witnesses at trial

Both the issues on which Trenga ruled for Durham — Dolan’s knowledge that Danchenko worked for Steele and Millian’s July 2016 email — may actually hurt Durham’s case. On all the other issues, every bit of Durham’s effort to spin a conspiracy theory, Trenga has ruled for Danchenko.

And aside from noting, twice, that Millian had “opportunity and motive to fabricate and/or misrepresent his thoughts,” there’s another sign that Trenga gets what Durham’s ruse is.

His reasoning for excluding the pee tape lays out all the flimsy threads Durham spun in an effort to present his conspiracy theory.

Through [German Ritz employee] Kuhlen, for example, the government seeks to prove that Danchenko completely fabricated his sources to Steele on the Ritz-Carlton allegations and then lied about it to the FBI to keep Dolan off the FBI’s radar. But that justification faces several obstacles. First, Dolan’s role in these uncharged false statements is unclear. The government does not allege that Dolan was a source for Danchenko’s Ritz-Carlton reporting, and therefore this evidence seemingly is not being used to prove the falsity of Danchenko’s statement in Count I. While Dolan, in June 2016, received a tour of the presidential suite and had lunch with the hotel’s general manager and staff, the government does not appear to intend to present evidence that Dolan told Danchenko about those events, including meeting or speaking with Kuhlen.2 Thus, the link between Danchenko’s allegedly false statement about the Ritz and Dolan is a highly attenuated one. Perhaps recognizing this, the government instead proffers that this evidence goes to proving the materiality of Danchenko’s Count I statement, not its falsity. But the proffered evidence relating to the RitzCarlton allegations bears little probative value in terms of materiality. The government contends that had Danchenko told the FBI that Dolan was a source it is more likely that it would have interviewed Dolan, in part, because of his proximity to Danchenko in June 2016. But that fact can be established separate and apart from trying to prove Danchenko lied about his Ritz-Carlton sourcing. The government can sufficiently establish at trial that Danchenko engaged in fact gathering for the Steele Reports in Moscow in June 2016, that Dolan was present in Moscow during that same time, and that the two met in Moscow, without getting into the purported false statements or the underlying details, which have an attenuated connection to the charged false statement. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, proving up an uncharged false statement does not bear on the materiality of the charged false statement.

Second, the government fails to reference any evidence that Danchenko told Steele either that he met with Kuhlen or, more generally, a western member of the hotel staff. The government does not, by all indications, intend to call Steele as a witness; and in terms of what Danchenko told Steele, the jury will be left solely with the hearsay description in the Report itself, which Steele, not Danchenko, prepared. Why Steele characterized the sources for the Ritz-Carlton allegations as he did in the Report or, indeed, whether the listed sources, in fact, came from Danchenko are subject to a significant degree of speculation. As such, the reference in the Report to those sources does not provide strong evidence that Danchenko informed Steele that he met with a western member of the hotel staff. Moreover, when asked by the FBI about “Source E” in his May 18, 2017 interview, Danchenko completely equivocated. See [Doc. No. 84], at 11 (“Danchenko: . . . I don’t think it’s just uh, I don’t think [UI] one of the um, hotel managers. Agent 1: You think source E is? Danchenko: [ ] Somebody I met. . . . And I don’t know who, who [Steele’s] referring to.”). The government seeks to prove that Danchenko never met with Kuhlen; and while that may be true, that evidence does not, given the circumstances, have much probative value concerning whether Danchenko lied to the FBI about his sourcing of the Ritz-Carlton allegations.

2 The government’s position on the probative value of this evidence, aside from materiality, is unclear. The government at one point, characterizes Dolan as a “fact witness” because of his tour of the presidential suite and time at the Ritz-Carlton in general, but does not draw a clear line between Dolan’s experiences and Danchenko’s reporting to Steele. [Doc. No. 78], at 10. The Indictment strongly implies, however, that Danchenko used information learned from Dolan during the June 2016 Moscow planning trip in his reporting to Steele. [Indictment], ¶¶ 30-34.

Judge Trenga won’t let this stuff in not just because the Rules of Evidence say you can’t rely on the emails of an unreliable witness written four politicized years after the fact without making him show up and risk prison himself to substantiate his claims.

He ruled against this stuff because Durham has not claimed to have any evidence to justify a number of wild leaps of logic he made to spin this conspiracy theory in the first place: Durham has not claimed to have (reliable) evidence about what Dolan told Danchenko over 6 years ago (indeed, Dolan apparently, “will testify that he has no recollection of seeing the defendant at the Ritz Carlton in June 2016”). Durham does not claim to know what Danchenko really told Steele about the pee tape, and he does not claim to know to what degree Steele exaggerated what Danchenko told him or if he otherwise reported it unfaithfully. The evidence Durham does have — that Danchenko made equivocal statements in response to a speculative cue and told the FBI his reporting stopped well short of what Steele claimed it did — doesn’t say what Durham claims it does.

Trenga won’t let Durham present his pee tape conspiracy theories in part because it is the pee tape, with six years of rabid focus by all parties behind it. But more importantly, he won’t let Durham present his pee tape conspiracies because Durham’s pee tape conspiracies were never any more substantive than Christoper Steele’s pee tape report drafted back in 2016.

That didn’t stop any number of media figures — Devlin Barrett, Jonathan Swan, Barry Meier, Rachel Weiner, and Marshall Cohen, among others — who regurgitated the evidentiary flimsiness of Durham’s conspiracy theories and printed them as fact.

You might be under the impression that John Durham has charged Igor Danchenko with multiple counts of lying regarding the role of Charles Dolan in the sourcing of the dossier. You might similarly be under the impression that, in the indictment, Durham alleges that Dolan was the source for the pee tape.

You’d be forgiven for believing those things. After all, the WaPo reported charges, plural, showed that “some of the material” in the Steele dossier came from Dolan.

The indictment also suggests Danchenko may have lied to Steele and others about where he was getting his information. Some of the material came from a Democratic Party operative with long-standing ties to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the charges, rather than well-connected Russians with insight into the Kremlin.

The allegations cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including The Washington Post.

Relying on that report, Jonathan Swan described charges, plural, that Dolan was, “one of the sources for the rumors about Trump.”

And Barry Meier, who so badly misunderstood the import of Oleg Deripaska in his book on private intelligence, also claimed there were charges, plural, relating to Dolan and insinuated that Durham had alleged the pee tape came from him.

In Durham’s indictment, however, Danchenko comes across more like the type of paid informant often found in the world of private spying — one who tells their employer what they want to hear.

According to those charges, he supposedly fed Steele some information that did not come from Kremlin-linked sources, as the dossier claims, but was gossip he picked up from an American public-relations executive with Democratic Party ties who did business in Moscow. In 2016, the indictment states, the manager of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow gave that executive a tour of the the hotel’s presidential suite, and soon afterward, Danchenko took a selfie of himself and the executive at the hotel.

Reporting on Danchenko’s arraignment, WaPo went off at more length, not only failing to distinguish an uncharged accusation as such (one likely source of the belief that Durham charged multiple counts pertaining to Dolan), but stating as fact that Danchenko made up an entire conversation — one Danchenko has consistently attributed to a named Russian source — regarding the pee tape.

He is also accused of lying about revealing to sources that he was working for Steele.

Durham says Danchenko made up a conversation he claimed was the source of one of the dossier’s most salacious claims, that Trump paid prostitutes at a Moscow hotel room to urinate on a bed in which President Barack Obama had once slept. The dossier also suggested Russian intelligence agencies had secretly recorded that event as potential blackmail material. Trump has denied any such encounter.

The indictment suggests that story came from Dolan, who in June 2016 toured a suite at a hotel in Moscow that was once occupied by Trump.

Judge Trenga’s ruling will spoil the frothers’ hopes for a trial about the pee tape.

But the frothers aren’t the problem: The problem is how many actual journalists bought this sleight of hand and now remain silent about the baseless claims they perpetuated last year.

Update: Meanwhile, Danchenko has moved to:

• Prevent Durham from eliciting testimony from Dolan about how he once speculated that Danchenko was a Russian spy
• Prevent Durham from arguing he withheld or omitted information
• Introduce Tips on Testifying from one or several US Attorneys Offices advising that a witness should stop once they’ve answered a question

Trump has appealed the part of the 11th Circuit’s decision that ruled DOJ did not have to share classified documents as part of the Special Master process. Trump did not appeal the part of the decision lifting the stay on using the classified documents as part of the criminal investigation.

The parts of this pertaining to classified documents and Presidential authority are even more of a shit-show than the 11th Circuit response was, and for an audience that has actually considered these issues.

But parts of it are jurisdictional and would not be frivolous if this were simply a discovery dispute (as Chris Kise treats it), and not one pertaining to classified information. But it does pertain to classified records.

And that’s why I think this is the most important part of the argument. Trump attempts to dismiss the government’s argument that it could appeal Judge Cannon’s order that it share classified records with Judge Raymond Dearie and Trump.

In its reply before the Eleventh Circuit, the Government made a fleeting statement that orders to disclose classified information are immediately appealable as collateral orders. App. F at 10 (citing Mowhawk Indus., 558 U.S. at 113 n.4; Al Odah v. United States, 559 F.3d 539, 542–44 (D.C. Cir. 2009)). This assertion is without merit.

[snip]

In Al Odah, the Government appealed from an order granting defendant’s counsel access to unredacted “classified” information. 559 F.3d at 543. The District of Columbia Circuit, applying the Cohen test, determined it had jurisdiction to hear the appeal of the collateral order in that case. Id. at 543-44. However, the present case is distinguishable from Al Odah, primarily due to whom the “classified” or “privileged” documents are being disclosed. Unlike in Al Odah, where the unredacted classified documents were ordered to be disclosed to defendant’s counsel, here the materials in question will be provided to the Special Master—a Senior United States District Judge with years of FISA court experience. As Special Master, Judge Dearie will effectively act as an arm of the District Court. It can hardly be suggested that Judge Dearie’s review of these records is in any way akin to dissemination of previously unshared, unredacted, classified information to counsel for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Additionally, the fact this dispute involves potential Presidential records14 creates a fundamental and significant distinction. Since any purported “classified records” may be Presidential records, President Trump (or his designee, including a neutral designee such as a special master) has an absolute right of access to same under the Presidential Records Act (“PRA”). 44 U.S.C. § 2205(3). Accordingly, President Trump (and, by extension, the Special Master) cannot in any event be denied access to those documents. Given this absolute right of access under the PRA, there is therefore no valid basis to preclude such review. Moreover, there cannot possibly be any valid claim of injury resulting from a statutorily authorized grant of access to a former President and/or his designee.

The Government argued on appeal, without explanation, that showing the purportedly classified documents to Judge Dearie would harm national security. App. D at 17. However, in seeking to stay the Injunction Order pending appeal, the Government then argued it needed to use those same documents to interview witnesses and submit to the grand jury. ECF No. 69 at 17. These positions cannot be reconciled.

14 Even the Government’s own Motion for Stay in the Eleventh Circuit acknowledged the obvious, that any purported “classified records” may be Presidential records. App. D at 10 [my emphasis]

At first, Trump argues that Cannon has not ordered DOJ to share classified records with anyone but Dearie. That’s false: She ordered DOJ to share classified records with Trump’s lawyers.

In fact, in the very next paragraph, Trump admits that Cannon’s order is worse to that in Al Odah a DC Circuit case decided per curiam by a panel including Merrick Garland. Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah was a plaintiff in a habeas petition — as an enemy combatant he hadn’t and never was charged with a crime — but he was challenging indefinite detention with inadequate due process. By comparison, Trump has not been charged and if and when he is charged, his lawyers will get to see the classified evidence against him. For now, he’s just a plaintiff and the record is uncontested that the warrant executed on his beach resort involved no gross abuse of his rights.

Without acknowledging that the claim Cannon only ordered DOJ to share with Dearie is false, Trump makes the argument that DOJ should have to share with Trump’s designees under the Presidential Records Act. As DOJ has already noted, of course, that’s only true of the records are where they are supposed to be: In the possession of the Archives. They’re not, and that’s part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is that, elsewhere in this appeal, Trump unquestioningly invokes EO 13526, which governed classified information for the entirety of his term and still does. As I’ve noted, that explicitly says even former Presidents must get waivers of Need to Know requirements to access classified information. Trump never changed that order before he became a former President.

In the next paragraph, Trump then complains that DOJ might complain about sharing all of this information with Dearie (and Trump’s lawyers) but might decide to share some of the information with witnesses. Again, elsewhere in this appeal, Trump unquestioningly invokes Navy v. Egan, which is the Supreme Court precedent that says the President — not the former President — gets to decide who needs access to classified information or not.

And nowhere in this argument do Trump’s lawyers admit something that DOJ laid out explicitly before the 11th Circuit: At least one of them, Evan Corcoran, is a witness or possibly even a co-conspirator (DOJ referred to his lawyers, plural, as potential witnesses, suggesting Lindsey Halligan (who was at Mar-a-Lago during the search) or Jim Trusty has had a role in the obstruction process as well. Of course, Trump also neglects to mention the obstruction part of the investigation, which makes all documents with classification marks proof that Trump defied a subpoena.

In other words, Trump is even more poorly situated than Al Odah, who at least had lawyers uninvolved in his potential security concerns. The only one of Trump’s lawyers who’s definitely not a witness, Kise, is also the one who recently was a registered agent of Venezuela.

As I keep saying in this matter, no one really knows how any of this will turn out. Trump’s argument that Ginni Thomas’ favorite President is no Gitmo detainee surely will work with Clarence, who will decide whether to take this appeal (or ask the entire court to weigh in). But along the way, Trump has compared himself unfavorably — legally, at least — with a former Gitmo detainee.

Update: This tweet thread from Steve Vladeck notes that Trump never describes what irreparable harm he faces if Dearie can’t review the classified records now.

Update: One more thing Trump doesn’t tell SCOTUS: That Judge Cannon has altered her own order, taking the classified documents out of it altogether, which makes Vladeck’s point about emergency relief even more hysterical.

Update: Justice Thomas has given the government a week to respond, which suggests even he doesn’t see this as the emergency it would have to be for SCOTUS to get involved.

Last Thursday, Judge Anthony Trenga denied Igor Danchenko’s motion to dismiss, while making it clear the government’s case was really shoddy.

Judge Anthony J. Trenga ruled that Danchenko’s case must be weighed by a jury, clearing the way for his trial next month. But it was “an extremely close call,” Trenga said from the bench.

(This AP piece has more detail but it also makes really obvious errors.) While there’s no ruling on the docket, Trenga must have approved any remaining CIPA issues.

The frothers, of course, remain obsessed with the news that the FBI formally made Danchenko a confidential human source in 2017. Most prominently, for example, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson wrote a pissy letter to Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray demanding information about why he was made an informant by October 22.

In December 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team identified Danchenko as Steele’s primary sub-source and, according to the FBI, “became familiar with the 2009 investigation.”[8] The FBI, even in light of the extensive derogatory information attached to Danchenko, proceeded to pay him as a confidential human source three months later from March 2017 to October 2020 as part of Crossfire Hurricane. Therefore, while we were investigating the Justice Department’s and FBI’s misconduct with respect to Crossfire Hurricane, you maintained him on the government’s payroll.

This extraordinary fact pattern requires additional information from the Justice Department and FBI relating to why Danchenko was placed on the payroll and paid by the taxpayer to assist in the federal government’s flawed investigation into President Trump.

I hope to finish a post explaining why all the frothers are painfully stupid in their response to this news before Danchenko’s trial starts next week.

I’m not surprised that Grassley and Johnson are just as clueless on this point as the rest of the frothers.

But I am somewhat surprised that Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, doesn’t know something about how FBI vetted informants until 2018, after they formalized Danchenko as one: They queried the person against all the FBI’s databases, including their FISA databases.

For example, we were told disputes occurred related to queries conducted for vetting purposes.52 Specifically, according to the FBI, it was concerned that as a result of the change to the query standard it could no longer perform vetting queries on raw FISA information before developing a confidential human source (CHS). FBI officials told us that it was important for agents to be able to query all of its databases, including FISA data, to determine whether the FBI has any derogatory or nefarious information about a potential CHS. However, because of the implementation of the 2018 standard, the FBI is no longer able to conduct these queries because they would violate the standard (unless the FBI has a basis to believe the subject has criminal intent or is a threat to national security). According to the FBI, because its goal is to uncover any derogatory information about a potential CHS prior to establishing a relationship, many agents continue to believe that it is irresponsible to engage in a CHS relationship without conducting a complete query of the FBI’s records as “smoking gun” information on a potential CHS could exist only in FISA systems. Nevertheless, these FBI officials told us that they recognize that they have been unsuccessful when presenting these arguments to NSD and the FISC and, as noted below, they follow NSD’s latest revision of query standard guidance.

Particularly given the past investigation into Danchenko and concerns about his past ties to Russian spooks, it is highly likely the FBI would have done such a back door search with Danchenko. They would have done it for precisely the concern Grassley and Johnson raised: to chase down some of the derogatory information on Danchenko from the earlier investigation. They would have done it to see the content of conversations he had with anyone of particular interest. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, the FBI likely could have done a backdoor search on Danchenko even after the querying standard changed in 2018.

The FBI likely made Danchenko a CHS not only for very good reasons, but for reasons that the frothers, if endless saturation inside a disinformation bubble hadn’t rotted their brains, might even approve of.

And before they did so, they likely did some very thorough vetting of him first.

On September 5, Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that depriving Donald Trump of personal items constituted “real harm.”

being deprived of potentially significant personal documents [] creates a real harm

Yesterday, the newly unsealed filter team status report revealed that, for two weeks, Judge Cannon deliberately inflicted that harm on Trump.

That’s because on August 30, DOJ’s filter team told her that they wanted to return the original copies of documents designated as Category B — 43 sets of documents amounting to 382 pages of documents — to Trump.

[T]he PrivilegeReview Team proposes to return the originals and provide a Bates-stamped control copy to the Plaintiff. Many of these materials do not appear to be privileged (although one appears to be.11), but they are all either legal in nature (e.g.,settlement, non-disclosure, and retainer agreements) or otherwise potentially sensitive, and they do not appear to be themselves government or Presidential Records or classified documents.

These documents were lawfully seized: many were likely in the desk drawer in which Trump also had a document marked Confidential and another document marked Secret. The others would have been seized from the storage closet where Trump was hiding 79 documents with classification markings. But on August 30, DOJ proposed to Aileen Cannon that they give them back.

Then, the next day, on September 1, filter attorney Benjamin Hawk asked for permission to pursue “the proposal that we offered,” which, in addition to providing Trump with Bates-stamped copies of all the documents treated as potentially privileged, would also include (per the status report that had been discussed at length in the hearing) giving him the originals back.

MR. HAWK: Your Honor, if I may.

THE COURT: Yes.

MR. HAWK: We would like to seek permission to provide copies — the proposal that we offered, Your Honor, provide copies to counsel of the 64 sets of the materials that are Bates stamped so they have the opportunity to start reviewing. THE COURT: I’m sorry, say that again, please.

MR. HAWK: The privilege review team would have provided Bates stamped copies of the 64 sets of documents to Plaintiff’s counsel. We would like to seek permission from Your Honor to be able to provide those now, not at this exact moment but to move forward to providing those so counsel has the opportunity to review them and understand and have the time to review and do their own analysis of those documents to come to their own conclusions. And if the filter process without a special master were allowed to proceed, we would engage with counsel and have conversations, determine if we can reach agreements; to the extent we couldn’t reach agreements, we would bring those before the Court, whether Your Honor or Judge Reinhart. But simply now, I’m seeking permission just to provide those documents to Plaintiff’s counsel.

THE COURT: All right. I’m going to reserve ruling on that request. I prefer to consider it holistically in the assessment of whether a special master is indeed appropriate for those privileged reviews. I think Mr. Bratt is hoping to get a few more minutes in.

In response to a request to (among other things) give the originals of Trump’s personal documents back, Cannon declined to approve the request. Had she approved it, 382 pages of personal documents would have been back in Trump’s custody right away. He would no longer have been deprived of those potentially significant personal documents. The harm that Cannon said was caused by his deprivation of those documents would be ended.

And that is precisely the harm she cited when she first ruled that a Special Master had to review the documents that she had prevented DOJ from returning to Trump. Indeed, she claimed there was a dispute about the very personal property that DOJ had tried to give back five days earlier.

Although some of the seized items (e.g., articles of clothing) appear to be readily identifiable as personal property, the parties’ submissions suggest the existence of genuine disputes as to (1) whether certain seized documents constitute personal or presidential records, and (2) whether certain seized personal effects have evidentiary value. Because those disputes are bound up with Plaintiff’s Rule 41(g) request and involve issues of fact, the Court “must receive evidence” from the parties thereon. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(g) (“The court must receive evidence on any factual issue necessary to decide the motion.”). That step calls for comprehensive review of the seized property.

Review is further warranted, as previewed, for determinations of privilege. The Government forcefully objects, even with respect to attorney-client privilege, pointing out that the Privilege Review Team already has screened the seized property and is prepared to turn over approximately 520 pages of potentially privileged material for court review pursuant to the previously approved ex parte filter protocol [ECF No. 48 p. 14]. In plain terms, the Government’s position is that another round of screening would be “unnecessary” [ECF No. 48 p. 22]. The Court takes a different view on this record.

By that point, she had personally been responsible for depriving Trump of 382 pages of documents for five days.

She would cite back to this passage, claiming a dispute including over documents DOJ had tried to give back, when she refused to stay her injunction on investigating the classified documents.

To further expand the point, and as more fully explained in the September 5 Order, the Government seized a high volume of materials from Plaintiff’s residence on August 8, 2022 [ECF No. 64 p. 4]; some of those materials undisputedly constitute personal property and/or privileged materials [ECF No. 64 p. 13]; the record suggests ongoing factual and legal disputes as to precisely which materials constitute personal property and/or privileged materials [ECF No. 64 p. 14]; and there are documented instances giving rise to concerns about the Government’s ability to properly categorize and screen materials [ECF No. 64 p. 15]. Furthermore, although the Government emphasizes what it perceives to be Plaintiff’s insufficiently particularized showing on various document-specific assertions [ECF No. 69 p. 11; ECF No. 88 pp. 3–7], it remains the case that Plaintiff has not had a meaningful ability to concretize his position with respect to the seized materials given (1) the ex parte nature of the approved filter protocol, (2) the relatively generalized nature of the Government’s “Detailed Property Inventory” [ECF No. 39-1], and (3) Plaintiff’s unsuccessful efforts, pre-suit, to gather more information from the Government about the content of the seized materials [ECF No. 1 pp. 3, 8–9 (describing Plaintiff’s rejected requests to obtain a list of exactly what was taken and from where, to inspect the seized property, and to obtain information regarding potentially privileged documents)]. [my emphasis]

The only dispute here was between Cannon and the government! They had already asked to give Trump’s personal documents back, and she refused to grant permission to do that.

And Cannon pointed to those personal items — items the government had already tried to give back — when she refused to lift her injunction on investigating classified documents.

Again, the September 5 Order imposes a temporary restraint on certain review and use of the seized materials, in natural conjunction with the special master process, only for the period of time required to resolve any categorization disputes and rule on Plaintiff’s Rule 41(g) requests. This restriction is not out of step with the logical approach approved and used for special master review in other cases, often with the consent of the government, and it is warranted here to reinforce the value of the Special Master, to protect against unwarranted disclosure and use of potentially privileged and personal material pending completion of the review process, and to ensure public trust.

[snip]

And the Court remains firmly of the view that appointment of a special master to conduct a review of the seized materials, accompanied by a temporary injunction to avoid unwarranted use and disclosure of potentially privileged and/or personal materials, is fully consonant with the foregoing principles and with the need to ensure at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under unprecedented circumstances.

As I have noted, there was just one clearly privileged document among the 11,000 seized on August 8. DOJ had tried to give it, along with some personal documents, back on August 30. Yet that is precisely what Cannon pointed to — the harm that she herself was sustaining — in her justification to hold up an investigation into 103 highly classified documents stored in a beach resort targeted by foreign spies.

She put the entire country at risk because of a harm she herself continued an extra two weeks.

And that’s not the only harm that Judge Cannon inflicted on Trump to justify interfering in this case.

First, we now know that her reference to tax and medical and accounting information was to the Category B documents — the ones that DOJ had already attempted to give back.

According to the Privilege Review Team’s Report, the seized materials include medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information [ECF No. 40-2;

I had mistakenly believed she was relying on the privilege status report — a document which the filter attorneys had said could safely be shared publicly. The status report doesn’t mention those specific documents at all (unless the Morgan Lewis document explicitly referenced accounting). Those references are to still-sealed information.

She’s the leak she claimed threatened Trump’s reputation.

Worse still, it’s now clear those really may be Trump’s personal accounting and tax documents (something that I previously thought was unlikely). If so, Cannon’s reference to that still-sealed information revealed to Tish James that documents potentially responsive to subpoenas — documents that Alina Habba swore did not exist — may soon be found at Mar-a-Lago.

Since she got this lawsuit, Judge Cannon has been doing backflips to try to help Trump. That goes so far as inflicting harm that she then uses to justify intervening.

Yesterday, SDFL AUSA Anthony Lacosta filed a sealed letter to Special Master Raymond Dearie along with the log laying out any disputes between the government and Trump over his potentially privileged documents.

Subsequent to that, Judge Aileen Cannon ordered unsealed the status report that Lacosta and Benjamin Hawk filed back on August 30. I will explain the two kinds of damage Judge Cannon did to Donald Trump in order to create an excuse to intervene in this matter — as I keep saying, Cannon caused the harm she intervened to fix.

For now, I want to talk about what happened with the potentially privileged material. Here’s a table of what we know about those documents.

Note that one page privileged document, item B-33. At least per the filter team, it may be the only clearly privileged document seized, one page out of 11,000 documents.

The warrant to search Trump’s beach resort required a privilege team to search his office. But (as members of that team explained in the hearing on September 1), they instead did the initial search of both the storage room and Trump’s office. As a result, the privilege team segregated 6 sets of information, which were catalogued on what I’ve called the SSA Receipt. The revised detailed inventory describes these boxes this way (note, these descriptions probably exclude the potentially privileged material, which is inventoried separately):

Item 4, which the status report describes as “the entire contents of a single drawer” in Trump’s office.

Three passports were originally in this drawer, which is why they were seized. They were returned on August 15. These documents were appropriately seized under the warrant because there were two classified documents in the drawer.

Items 29 through 33, which were in the Storage Room.

These boxes would have been appropriately seized under the warrant because all were stored in the place where boxes storing classified documents were stored. In fact, Item 29 had a Top Secret document in it and Item 33 has two empty staff secretary folders in it. Additionally, all are described to contain government documents, which were also authorized for seizure.

Two days after the search, on August 10, a Case Agent found a 3-page letter from law firm Morgan Lewis, “comingled with newspapers;” Morgan Lewis’ Sherri Dillon was named in Tish James’ motion to compel Trump’s deposition. So they sent the entire box to the privilege team, as described in the warrant. The box also included 4 pages of government documents treated as potentially privileged, including an email from the Air Force Academy’s coach.

By August 11, the privilege team had segregated out anything that  met their over-inclusive standard for potentially privileged documents from the rest of the documents, then sent the 7 boxes to the investigative team (which is, presumably, what led to the return of the passports days later).

On August 25, a case agent provided one more document to the privilege team:

39-page set of materials that appears to reflect the former President’s calls. (The majority of pages are titled “The President’s Calls” and include the Presidential Seal.) Specifically, the document contains handwritten names, numbers, and notes that primarily appear to be messages, as well as several pages of miscellaneous notes.

One of these messages was from “Rudy,” though did not appear to constitute legal advice.

The privilege team separated all these potentially privileged documents into two categories:

Category A

This category includes 21 sets of documents for a total of 138 pages. Most are, “primarily government records, public documents, and communications from third parties,” which could not qualify as privilege. One document is a 3-page email to a White House email account, which the government maintains constitutes a waiver to attorney-client privilege. As noted, another is a printed email from the Air Force Academy’s head baseball coach with the word “PatC” on it.

For example, the Privilege Review Team agents identified and segregated a printed email exchange between the U.S. Air Force Academy’s head baseball coach and the White House because “PatC” (perhaps a reference to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone) was written on the document in black marker (Item Number 4 in Exhibit A at FILTER A-005).

Another, as noted above, is one of the phone messages from the President’s Calls (we know this is a phone message because both are described as Item 21 in Category A), from “Rudy” and appearing to be a topic unrelated to legal advice.

Category B

This category consists of 43 sets of documents, for a total of 382 pages. The status report describes those as,

legal in nature (e.g., settlement, non-disclosure, and retainer agreements) or otherwise potentially sensitive, and they do not appear to be themselves government or Presidential Records or classified documents.

According to the privilege team, just one of those documents appeared to be privileged. But way back on August 30, they proposed to give the originals of all these documents back to Trump. Then they tried again on September 1. Trump had to wait two more weeks before receiving these documents, so that Judge Cannon could use them as her basis for intervening in the case.

September 26 email

According to Trump’s objections, on September 26, the government provided an email newly identified by case agents (presumably in the course of reviewing the inventory). The government maintains the email is not privileged but Jim Trusty claims it is.

On Monday, September 26, counsel for the Privilege Review Team provided Plaintiff’s counsel with another example of filter failure. The email in question was identified by the “FBI case team,” and returned to the Privilege Review Team, which is characterizing the communication as non-privileged. Plaintiff believes the email falls squarely into the category of attorney-client privileged.

In addition to the document sorting, before the filter team shared any photographs documenting the search, both the filter agents and the filter attorneys reviewed the photographs to ensure no privileged documents were captured in the photo.

Update: Added explanation for Morgan Lewis letter, h/t Simon. Added observation that there may be only a single privileged page in the whole seizure. Corrected numerical error.

The Archives (NARA) has released several sets of documents pertaining to the documents Trump stole, including the email that kicked off the entire hunt for documents on May 6, 2021. In it, NARA General Counsel Gary Stern emailed Pat Philbin, Mike Purpura, and Scott Gast talking about known missing items (including the love letters from Kim Jong Un).

Of those love letters, Stern described that Trump had a binder of them made right before he left office, just like he had a binder of the records pertaining to the Russian investigation.

[I]n January 2021, just prior to the end of the Administration, the originals were put in a binder for the President, but were never returned to the Office of Records Management for transfer to NARA.

More hilariously, Stern told the Trump lawyers that he knew of around 24 boxes of records that had been kept in Trump’s residence that weren’t returned. Stern told Trump’s lawyers that he knew that Pat Cipollone had told Trump to give them back — all 24 boxes of Presidential Records!

It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original Presidential records were kept in the Residence of the White House over the course of President Trump’s last year in office and have not been transferred to NARA, despite a determination by Pat Cipollone in the final days of the Administration that they need to be. I had also raised this concern with Scott during the final weeks.

NARA emailed Trump’s lawyers and told them he knew that there were roughly 24 boxes that Trump’s own White House Counsel had determined belonged to NARA.

And after an extended fight, Trump returned just 15.

Trump apparently thought a building full of archivists would just round up from 15.

Before you read this report on tensions between FBI Office of General Counsel’s National Security and Cyber Law Branch (NSCLB)  and DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD), remember the following things:

• In significant part because of jurisdictional limitations, DOJ Inspector General blamed FBI for everything that went wrong with the Carter Page FISA applications, and in the wake of that report, Bill Barr, Trump, and his allies in Congress used it to damage the career every single person at FBI who had been involved with the Russian investigation (except for the two guys who made multiple mistakes in dismissing the Alfa Bank allegations).
• John Durham then used that damage to attempt to coerce testimony, sometimes false, from FBI figures in his never-ending witch-hunt.
• For the same jurisdictional limitations, any abuse John Durham engages in or Andrew DeFilippis engaged in can only be reviewed by DOJ’s feckless Office of Professional Responsibility, not by DOJ IG.
• After that report, DOJ IG developed proof that Carter Page was not special; by some measures, his FISA application was better than those of people who hadn’t been fired by a future President for precisely the same foreign ties that the FISA was meant to assess.
• The NSD then dismissed those findings from DOJ IG, largely by adopting a standard different from the one that had been adopted with Carter Page (it’s unclear whether DOJ IG is still trying to resolve these discrepancies or not).
• None of the stuff that happened thus far addresses the substantive problems with the Page applications.

The report talks about the “historically strained” relationship between these two sets of lawyers, without laying out the role that the Carter Page review — and the Trump DOJ’s use of DOJ IG to punish his enemies generally — did to make things worse.

That tension plays out in the report. For example, Horowitz only provides recommendations to NSCLB and FBI’s OGC, not NSD. In each case, FBI is directed to coordinate with NSD, without the counterpart recommendation. The tension is particularly critical to something that DOJ IG cannot, therefore, recommend: That NSD have access to FBI case files, which would allow them to play a more proactive role in the vetting of FISA applications. It would also make NSD share in accountability for any problems that arise (as they should have with Page), though, and unsurprisingly NSD doesn’t want that.

NSCLB attorneys expressed their concern that although NSD attorneys assist agents in drafting the FISA applications submitted to the FISC, they do not share accountability when compliance incidents are reported to the FISC. Although NSCLB officials acknowledged the oversight role that NSD has related to FISA, they emphasized the need for FISA to be a team effort and not an adversarial relationship and stated their belief that the number of compliance incidents would be reduced if NSD would review the FISA-related documents housed in the FBI’s IT systems. However, according to NSCLB attorneys, NSD has expressed disinterest in ensuring FISA compliance on the front end and has said that it is the agent’s responsibility to identify in the first instance, anything that is necessary to be reported to the FISC. We were also told by NSCLB attorneys that NSD has said that it is concerned that an appearance of NSD attorneys having knowledge of the underlying documents would imply that they have full knowledge of all of the supporting documents, which would not be practicably feasible for them to have.

A senior NSD official that we spoke with told us that NSD has limited resources, and it does not have direct access to FBI systems.

NSD wants none of this accountability and DOJ IG can’t make them.

For all the tensions, though, it’s a fascinating report, as useful for providing both historical and bureaucratic background on this process as anything else. Much of this tension arises out of DOJ’s admitted parallel construction — using alternative sources for certain facts to protect sources and methods. There’s even a paragraph that describes NSCLB’s role as such (though not by name).

For instance, we were told that NSD relies on NSCLB to review documents such as search warrants and criminal complaint affidavits for law enforcement or other sensitivity concerns before they are filed with the court by prosecutors. When this process is not followed, it can become particularly problematic if NSCLB later finds that sensitive information was contained in the court filing. For example, if the FBI used a sensitive platform to obtain information, prosecutors may decide that a description of the platform is needed to support the search warrant or complaint. In such instances, NSCLB may ask prosecutors to anonymize that information. However, if NSCLB does not review the case agent’s draft affidavit in support of a search warrant or complaint before the agent provides it to the prosecutor, sensitive information may be exposed. Also, senior NSCLB officials told us that including an NSCLB attorney early in this process can provide an effective means of ensuring prosecutors have information necessary to support their case. Specifically, NSCLB can help identify which information may be difficult to use from a classification and sensitivity perspective and provide suggestions to obtain the information from an independent source without implicating sensitive techniques.

The report claims the particular roles of each side are not well-defined. I’m not convinced that’s the case, though. As described, NSCLB protects national security and the secrets that go along with that (including secret intelligence techniques). And NSD fulfills the needs of prosecutions as well as “protect[ing] FISA as a tool so the FBI can continue to use it.”

In one telling explanation,

NSCLB senior officials highlighted the fact that criminal prosecution is not necessarily the FBI’s aim in every national security investigation and that the FBI sometimes appropriately pursues investigations with the aim of disrupting threats or collecting intelligence.20

These are tensions, but they are not necessarily bad tensions. And it doesn’t seem like this report considers how this compares to the relationship between a prosecutor and a case agent where there are none of the national security (and classification) concerns.

In any case, the report attributes that tension for two radically different understandings about the standards involved in two FISA concepts, including one — material facts that must be disclosed to the FISA Court — that was at the core of the Carter Page case.

In the case of materiality, the FBI seems to be playing dumb (perhaps to avoid opening a whole historical can of worms given the aftermath of the Page IG Report).

The 2009 Accuracy Memorandum defined material facts as, “those facts that are relevant to the outcome of the probable cause determination.” The FBI had interpreted this standard as facts that are outcome determinative, or facts that would invalidate the legal determination. However, NSD had applied a broader standard than the FBI, with NSD’s interpretation of material facts being facts that are capable of influencing the requested legal determination. An NSD senior official told us that the FBI’s viewpoint was based on the FBI’s involvement in the criminal law enforcement arena where the threshold for materiality in a criminal search warrant is outcome determinative. This official also stated that most material errors reported to the FISC do not invalidate the legal determination, and that the FISC still expects for these types of errors to be reported to them.

Senior NSD officials stated NSD had applied the same standard for at least 15 years and NSCLB had known of NSD’s application of the standard because it was reflected in previous Rule 13 notices filed with the FISC. For example, in the OIG’s report on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, NSD supervisors stated that “NSD will consider a fact or omission material if the information is capable of influencing the court’s probable cause determination, but NSD will err on the side of disclosure and advise the court of information that NSD believes the court would want to know.”41 Similarly, in a FISC filing on January 10, 2020, NSD referred to this statement in the OIG report while describing its oversight and reporting practices when errors or omissions are identified.42 However, senior NSCLB officials told us that NSCLB was first made aware of NSD’s interpretation of the materiality standard in the OIG’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation report and NSD’s subsequent January 2020 FISC filing.43

In the case of the claimed differing understand of  querying techniques under 702 (in which, by my read, both sides were pretending this hasn’t dramatically changed as FISC became aware of how 702 collection was really used), NSD seems to engage in the knowing bullshit.

In contrast, NSD told us that the query standard has been the same since 2008. A senior NSD official stated that the FBI had a fundamental misunderstanding of the standard and that compliance incidents were not identified sooner because NSD can only review a limited sample of the FBI’s queries and NSD improved upon its ability to identify non-compliant queries over time.

I knew the standard the FBI was using. It is not credible that I knew what it was and NSD did not.

In both cases, this claimed disagreement seems to be an effort to avoid applying the standards adopted post-Page to the FISA approach (and not just on individualized orders) applied before then.

The report confirms something that had been obvious from heavily redacted sections of the last several 702 reauthorizations: FBI had been using 702 collection (and FISA collection generally) to vet potential confidential human sources.

For example, we were told disputes occurred related to queries conducted for vetting purposes.52 Specifically, according to the FBI, it was concerned that as a result of the change to the query standard it could no longer perform vetting queries on raw FISA information before developing a confidential human source (CHS). FBI officials told us that it was important for agents to be able to query all of its databases, including FISA data, to determine whether the FBI has any derogatory or nefarious information about a potential CHS. However, because of the implementation of the 2018 standard, the FBI is no longer able to conduct these queries because they would violate the standard (unless the FBI has a basis to believe the subject has criminal intent or is a threat to national security). According to the FBI, because its goal is to uncover any derogatory information about a potential CHS prior to establishing a relationship, many agents continue to believe that it is irresponsible to engage in a CHS relationship without conducting a complete query of the FBI’s records as “smoking gun” information on a potential CHS could exist only in FISA systems. Nevertheless, these FBI officials told us that they recognize that they have been unsuccessful when presenting these arguments to NSD and the FISC and, as noted below, they follow NSD’s latest revision of query standard guidance.

Using back door searches to vet informants is an approved use on the NSA and, probably, CIA side. In the FBI context, my understanding is that informants understand they’re exchanging Fourth Amendment protections as part of their relationship with the FBI. Perhaps if the FBI had simply made this public, it could have been an approved use. Instead, we’re playing all these games about the application.

The report describes — but doesn’t really address — how the tension between NSCLB and NSD undermined National Security Reviews which,

examine (1) whether sufficient predication exists for FBI preliminary and full investigations, (2) whether a sufficient authorized purpose exists for assessments, (3) whether tools utilized during or prior to the assessment are permitted, and (4) all aspects of National Security Letters issued by the FBI.

There was a huge backlog of these until NSD hurriedly closed a bunch of them in 2020, which is the kind of thing that when Bush did them with FISA tools in 2008 was itself a symptom. So, too, may be some policy memos that happened in Lisa Monaco’s first days and John Demers’ last ones.

The section I found to be most interesting (and one that DOJ IG could not or chose not to address in recommendations) pertains to the tension over declassification of material for prosecutions.

According to the FBI’s Declassification of Classified National Security Information Policy Guide, NSCLB must participate in the approval of discretionary declassification decisions concerning FBI classified information. NSCLB assists in ensuring that the declassification of either FISA derived material or other FBI classified information is: (1) necessary to protect threats against national security; (2) will not include classified materials obtained from foreign governments; (3) will not include classified materials obtained from other U.S. agencies (unless authorized by the originating agency); (4) will not reveal any sensitive or special techniques; and (5) will not adversely impact other FBI investigations.

[snip]

Despite the FBI’s limited support role, NSD and DOJ staff we spoke with told us that they believe NSCLB has involved itself inappropriately in discovery matters. For example, an NSD senior official told us that NSCLB has attempted to second guess discovery decisions made by prosecutors. This NSD official believed that NSCLB’s role is not to participate in the determination of how the prosecutors choose to protect a piece of classified information, but instead to identify information that is classified, its level of classification, and how a declaration from the owner of that information would explain to a court why the information presents a national security concern. According to this official, NSCLB may rightfully conclude the information is too sensitive to provide in discovery and, as a result, prosecutors may have to dismiss that case. However, we were told that discovery issues do not generally reach that point. We also were told by some AUSAs that they have had to remind NSCLB attorneys that AUSAs have the discovery obligations to courts and will make discoverability determinations.

An official from one USAO told us that, while it is understood that satisfying discovery obligations is the responsibility of the prosecutor, the FBI’s interest in protecting its equities may justify challenging a prosecutor’s discovery decisions. The official explained that such back and forth may be necessary to reach a balance between the needs of discovery and the protection of sensitive information; however, when the FBI’s role in the process extends into making assessments of what is discoverable it can slow the process down and necessitate the prosecutor asserting authority over discovery decisions.

[snip]

By contrast, senior NSCLB officials noted that several factors outside of NSCLB’s control can cause the declassification process to take a considerable amount of time. According to these officials, the FBI addresses the risk of disclosing information that could cause significant harm to the American public by using a thorough, deliberate process which can be impacted by the volume of information, the sensitivities involved, and the resources available to conduct a review. In defending NSCLB’s role in the discovery process, a senior NSCLB official expressed the view that AUSAs tend to err on the side of making material discoverable, even when it involves national security information, and do not appreciate how the disclosure of information may affect other FBI or USIC operations. This official told us that NSD often prefers to declassify all information that could be relevant, necessary, or discoverable to ease the prosecution of the case or the discovery process. .

This is, in my opinion, the description of what lawyers for an intelligence agency would do. That seems to be the role NSCLB is playing, for better or worse. In light of the cases described out of which the more specific tensions arise, I find the complaint that NSCLB is delaying discovery rather telling. If prosecutors choose to make a case that NSCLB believes would have been better handled via disruption, for example, or are entirely frivolous, such tensions are bound to surface. That said, if FBI’s General Counsel’s Office has been coopted people trying to protect sources and methods, NSD lawyers are going to look like the only ones guarding due process (though I’m sure they would with CIA’s lawyers, too).

There’s a lot of worthwhile observations in this report. But it’s hard to shake the conclusion that the most important takeaway is that DOJ cannot continue to have such asymmetry in the oversight that FBI and DOJ experience.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Yes, it’s me, the golf widow, once again drafting a Trash Talk post.

And yes, I’m here at home alone enjoying the quiet of my remaining golf widowhood. This weekend is one of the last of regular play on the local course; next weekend there will be some celebratory golf outing shindig in which my kids will also golf while I dogsit.

Meanwhile I’m doing exciting things like cleaning carpets and scrubbing floors, washing draperies, and baking since I won’t be able to much next weekend with dogs and adult children underfoot.

What about you? Are you sportsing, or watching sportsing, or cleaning up after this week’s hurricane? Do tell.

~ ~ ~

Dreadful news came from Indonesia this week when at least 127 people died in a stampede at the Kanjuruhan Stadium after police used tear gas to disperse an angry crowd gathering on the football pitch.

This Reuters’ video shows how the crowd funneled toward an exit:

At least 125 people died in a stampede at a soccer stadium in Indonesia after police tried to quell violence on the pitch. https://t.co/zyh13g0G0m pic.twitter.com/EPbsBdSIhr

— Reuters (@Reuters) October 2, 2022

But this video reveals the animosity police displayed toward the attendees on the field which may also have led to panic:

At least 129 killed & 180 injured at a soccer match in Indonesia after a crowd stampede during a riot. Seems one of the world’s worst stadium disasters.
Horrific!#Indonesia pic.twitter.com/uCLXbUEko1

— Majid Alam (@iammajidalam) October 2, 2022

The resulting death toll already exceeds that of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, making Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster in Malang the sixth deadliest sporting event related disaster in history.

Let’s hope there will be a thorough inquiry into this horror with accountability, and more quickly than followed the deadly Hillsborough crush. There are global repercussions in spite of the soccer match’s local nature; were there any stadium design problems which encouraged this crush? Were there lessons from policing at the stadium which might prevent future stampedes?

~ ~ ~

It’s been a shitty week in the National Football League – not because of any one game but because of players’ health and the league’s handling of the same.

Lots of buzz right now after this tweet by St. Louis Cardinal’s JJ Watt:

I was just told somebody leaked some personal information about me and it’s going to be reported on today.

I went into A-Fib on Wednesday, had my heart shocked back into rhythm on Thursday and I’m playing today.

That’s it.

— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) October 2, 2022

ahead of this news:

Cardinals defensive end JJ Watt revealed that he underwent treatment for a heart condition on Wednesday ahead of the team’s matchup against the Panthers on Sunday https://t.co/3xgduHsruZ

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) October 2, 2022

Atrial fibrillation (A-fib) is a particular kind of irregular heart beat rhythm. There are many underlying causes though it occurs most frequently in persons age 50 and older. Watt is a bit young and assuming his general health has been monitored by the team, conditions like heart disease and diabetes are unlikely.

Football fans are shocked by this development but they shouldn’t be; A-fib can also be caused by viruses, both during active infection and as sequelae. We should expect to see more younger persons developing cardiac sequelae because of exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

Watt may or may not have had COVID, but it’s not impossible for an exposure to have played a role in his A-fib event.

It should disturb football fans that Watt’s health care privacy was violated in spite of HIPAA privacy rules – especially since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision undermined citizens’ unenumerated right to privacy.

As distressing as it is to know an NFL player was treated for A-fib this week and is playing today, it’s also distressing that another NFL player’s career may be over because the NFL and their team didn’t handle the player’s recent injury with more caution.

The Miami Dolphins’ 24-year-old quarterback Tua Tagovailoa was injured during last weekend’s meetup with the Buffalo Bills:

Tua’s head snaps back and hits the turf. He just walked to the locker room. pic.twitter.com/v8rsjHnbOH

— Mike Cugno (@MikeCugnoCBS4) September 25, 2022

In spite of what appears to be a head injury in the second quarter, Tagovailoa came back after halftime and finished the game throwing 186 yards after he was given a once-over by the team’s medical personnel which said Tagovailoa had a neck injury. The NFL Players’ Association demanded an investigation into what appeared to be the Dolphins’ skirting of the league’s concussion rules.

Before Thursday’s match against the Cincinnati Bengals, the concussion Legacy Foundation’s founder tweeted about Tagovailoa:

If Tua takes the field tonight, it’s a massive step back for #concussion care in the NFL.

If he has a 2nd concussion that destroys his season or career, everyone involved will be sued & should lose their jobs, coaches included. We all saw it, even they must know this isn’t right https://t.co/vxpaOif5rh

— Chris Nowinski, Ph.D. (@ChrisNowinski1) September 29, 2022

A sadly prescient opinion; Tagovailoa suffered head and neck injuries during the game, so severe that he manifested a fencing response on the field before the Dolphins’ medical team could reach him.

It was so awful and gruesome I won’t even share it, such an obvious sign of a head injury. He was seen at the local hospital but the team managed to get him packed up and on a plane with the rest of the team to head home to Miami. Goodness knows what all that handling including pressure changes did to Taigovaloa’s head and neck.

The NFLPA terminated the unaffiliated neurotrauma consultant involved in the assessment of Tagovailoa after his Week 3 injury before Thursday night’s game, but too late for Tagovailoa whose career may be over.

How badly do football fans need sports? At what point will they demand the NFL do better by players?

Or have fans become numb after more than 31 months of death and disability chewing away at the country during the pandemic?

~ ~ ~

Finally, we get to my kind of sports.

The World Series kicked off last night in Kansas City, Missouri. Nope, not Major League Baseball, not any kind of ball sports but the American Royal World Series of BBQ.

I think we need to send our contributor Jim White to this event next year, provided a hurricane doesn’t bear down on his part of the country next September/October.

Better get to practicing, Jim!

~ ~ ~

Once again, this thread will be an overflow catch-all this week if the House January 6 Committee hearing is rescheduled to this week. Bring all your off-topic discussion here to this open thread.

In the first paragraph of her order reversing Raymond Dearie’s order that Trump verify the inventory DOJ provided, Aileen Cannon identified three documents by name: Dearie’s amended case management plan, dated September 23, Trump’s objections, which were originally sent to Dearie on September 25 but which she may have only seen on September 28, and a government filing she renames, which was originally titled, “Motion to Modify and Adopt the Amended Case Management Plan with Comments on the Amended Plan and Plaintiff’s Objections.” That was filed on September 27.

THIS CAUSE comes before the Court upon the Amended Case Management Plan (the “Plan”) [ECF No. 112], filed on September 23, 2022. The Court has reviewed the Plan, Plaintiff’s Objections [ECF No. 123-1], Defendant’s Response to Plaintiff’s Objections and Motion to Modify and Adopt the Plan [ECF No. 121], and the full record.

Later in her order, when she discusses Dearie’s own order that Trump confirm the inventory before the start of the designations, she describes the deadline he set for the inventory verification as September 30, then notes in a footnote that he modified that deadline in an interim report to her on September 27.

In addition to requiring Defendant to attest to the accuracy of the Inventory, the Plan also requires Plaintiff, on or before September 30, 2022, to lodge objections to the Inventory’s substantive contents.2

2 The Special Master’s Interim Report No. 1 modified this deadline to October 7, 2022 [ECF No. 118 p. 2].

Those two details are a tell to understand what, bureaucratically, Cannon imagines she did on Thursday. On Thursday, she was overruling Dearie’s plan as it existed on September 23, not as it existed on September 27.  She was effectively taking over the review starting on September 23, but without telling anyone that or explaining what deadlines applied.

It’s a way — and was used as a way in this instance — to make Dearie entirely superfluous, a mere showpiece to give her own direct intervention to give Trump his way the patina of legitimacy.

Start with Cannon’s order appointing Dearie, dated September 15. It required that Dearie submit a plan to her within ten days, so by September 25.

Within ten (10) calendar days following the date of this Order, the Special Master shall consult with counsel for the parties and provide the Court with a scheduling plan setting forth the procedure and timeline—including the parties’ deadlines—for concluding the review and adjudicating any disputes.

She set a five day deadline for the parties to object to that order, after which she would review the matter de novo.

The parties may file objections to, or motions to adopt or modify, the Special Master’s scheduling plans, orders, reports, or recommendations no later than five (5) calendar days after the service of each, and the Court shall review those objections or motions, and any procedural, factual, or legal issues therein, de novo. Failure to timely object shall result in waiver of the objection.

The day after the 11th Circuit overruled her injunction on classified documents, on September 22, Cannon issued an order that everyone thought was just her acknowledging that the classified documents were no longer covered by the order (that’s not technically true, and I think she doesn’t believe it’s true even now, but it took the classified documents out of Dearie’s work plan). In taking out the reference to classified documents, it also took out this entire paragraph, including the bolded language about interim reports.

The Special Master and the parties shall prioritize, as a matter of timing, the documents marked as classified, and the Special Master shall submit interim reports and recommendations as appropriate. Upon receipt and resolution of any interim reports and recommendations, the Court will consider prompt adjustments to the Court’s orders as necessary. [my emphasis]

I raised it at the time, people poo pooed my concern (and scolded Dearie for raising it later). But this was the moment when Cannon told Dearie to fuck off, only without telling him she had done that.

Shortly after that, on day 7 after his appointment, Dearie submitted to the two sides his original plan. He gave them until September 27 to raise objections.

This Case Management Plan shall be filed on the docket and deemed served on each party today. The parties may file objections to, or motions to adopt or modify, the foregoing Case Management Plan by September 27, 2022. Failure to timely object shall result in waiver of the objection. See Appointing Order, ¶ 11; Fed. R. Civ. P. 53(f).1

1. To the extent the parties file objections with the Court as to this Case Management Plan, the deadlines set forth above shall remain in effect while such objections are pending.

Clearly, at that point, he believed he would have time to address any concerns himself. The work plan included his plan to use (and pay, as the only paid employee) retired Magistrate Judge James Orenstein to help with the review.

On September 23, DOJ informed Dearie that Trump still hadn’t contracted with a vendor to scan the documents, and asked for a one business day extension, but still with the expectation that Trump would arrange the contract (since he is paying). DOJ also asked him to tweak his order to make it clear the inventory would not include the potentially privileged documents. They noted that Trump still hadn’t provided his proposed protective order, which had been due September 20, which would have held up the document scanning anyway.

Later that day, Trusty filed a protective order.

Dearie issued an updated work order, with the same September 27 deadline for changes. It also still included his plan to hire Orenstein. I believe this is the work order Cannon took as operative on Thursday.

Also on September 23, Dearie issued a protective order that (the docket entry noted) had been approved by Cannon. It sided with Trump that he didn’t have to share the name of his reviewers, something that was made less urgent after the 11th Circuit had taken the classified documents out of the work plan.

On September 25, on Dearie’s original deadline for filing a work plan with Cannon (but before the date he provided for changes), Jim Trusty emailed Dearie his three objections: they didn’t want to affirmatively confirm the inventory, they didn’t want to distinguish between Executive Privilege that could and could not be shared with the Executive Branch, and they didn’t think they had to brief the appropriateness of filing a Rule 41(g) motion to Cannon rather than to Reinhart. This was not docketed and Judge Cannon is not listed as a recipient of this email. Chris Kise was on the signature block of this letter.

The next day, September 26, the second public deadline (after the protective order, which Trump missed), DOJ filed a revised and sworn affidavit. That was also the deadline for Trump to designate all the potentially privileged files he had had since September 16.

A bunch of things happened on September 27. I’ll treat them in the order they appear in the docket, which looks like this:

First, Dearie filed a staffing proposal to Cannon, noting that the window for the two sides to object to it had expired. This was the first moment that the staffing got separated from his work plan.

No party has submitted any comment to the foregoing proposal, and the time for such comment has lapsed. Accordingly, the undersigned respectfully submits the foregoing proposal to the Court for approval.

Then Dearie filed an interim report to Cannon. In it, he recommended Cannon add back in the language authorizing interim reports that she struck along with language about classified documents.

Interim Reports and Adjustments to Prior Orders. In the original Appointing Order, the Court directed that “the Special Master shall submit interim reports and recommendations as appropriate. Upon receipt and resolution of any interim reports and recommendations, the Court will consider prompt adjustments to the Court’s orders as necessary.” Appointing Order ¶ 6. However, the Court later struck that language as part of its order implementing an unrelated ruling by the Eleventh Circuit. As the language quoted above as to interim reports and adjustments to prior orders is consistent with the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling and the efficient administration of the Appointing Order as amended, the undersigned respectfully recommends that the Court issue an order reinstating that language.

His interim report clearly expected he’d get one more shot to resolve disputes. In it, he said the parties would have until October 2 to respond.

This Interim Report and Recommendation shall be filed on the docket and deemed served on each party today. The parties may file objections to, or motions to adopt or modify, the foregoing report and recommendation by October 2, 2022

Next, there’s a sealed (and still sealed) order.

Then Cannon approved Dearie’s staffing plan, but declined to replace the language in her original order that permitted interim reports.

The Court takes no other action at this time, recognizing that the Order Appointing Special Master authorizes the Special Master to file reports and make recommendations as appropriate.

It was not clear at the time, but this effectively told Dearie that his understanding of how things would work — that he could issue interim reports and only after that Cannon would intervene — had been changed in the wake of the 11th Circuit ruling on classified documents. Effectively, Cannon told Dearie on September 27 she had taken over the work plan on September 23. That’s why, I suspect, that she only cited his September 27 Interim Report in a footnote. She basically ignored everything he did after September 23.

After that, DOJ filed its request for another deadline extension, along with its objections to Trump’s objections received two days earlier.

On September 28, Trump for the first time raised timeline concerns in writing, also claiming that DOJ had told Trump there were 200,000 pages (as I’ve written here, that’s virtually impossible; I suspect it came from the work order DOJ provided to solicit the vendor). The letter was not signed by Kise, and raised a lot of bogus claims about privilege (and also seemed to indicate that Trump had already missed the privilege deadline). Along with those concerns about timing, Trump filed his complaints, which (at least based on the public record) was the first time Cannon would have seen the complaints; the docket exhibit is what she cited in her order.

Working under Dearie’s deadline, DOJ had four more days to respond to Trusty’s probably bogus claims of 200,000 documents and to rebut the privielge claims. Working off a five day deadline from Dearie’s submission of his amended work order on September 27, DOJ also had four more days. Working under Cannon’s original deadline — five days after Dearie’s original deadline of September 25 — they had two more days. Under Dearie’s September 23 order, the final deadline was September 27.

What Cannon appears to have done is with no formal notice of what the deadline was or even that ten plus five was no longer operative, treat Dearie’s September 23 filing as his final action in setting the plan, but along the way use her own five day deadline for complaints instead of the September 27 deadline Dearie gave, which is the only way Trump’s temporal complaint would be timely yet have her order not be days premature.

The next day, with no notice of any new deadline, Cannon issued her order throwing out most of Dearie’s plan. I’ve spent hours and days looking at this, and there’s no making sense of the deadlines. Certainly, this could not have happened if any of Dearie’s deadlines had been treated as valid.

DOJ took a look at what Cannon had done and moved the 11th Circuit to accelerate the review process. They cited a number of reasons for the change in schedule. They described that Cannon sua sponte extended the deadline on the review to December 16.

On September 29, subsequent to the parties’ submission of letters to Judge Dearie, the district court sua sponte issued an order extending the deadline for the special master’s review process to December 16 and making other modifications to the special master’s case management plan, including overruling the special master’s direction to Plaintiff to submit his designations on a rolling basis.

Depending on how you make sense of Cannon’s Calvinball deadlines, it was a sua sponte order, because Trump’s complaint about the deadlines (not to mention his complaints generally) came in after the deadline attached to the Dearie plan that Cannon seems to treat as his final official action.

I think what really happened is that Cannon fired Dearie without firing him in response to being told by the 11th Circuit she had abused her authority, ensuring not only that nothing he decides will receive any consideration, but also ensuring that he has almost no time to perform whatever review role he has been given.

Effectively, Judge Cannon has just punted the entire process out after the existing appeals schedule, at which point — she has made clear — she’ll make her own decisions what government property she’s going to claim Trump owns.

Timeline

September 15, 2022: Cannon opinion denying stay; Cannon’s order of appointment; Raymond Dearie declaration

September 16, 2022: DOJ motion for a stay

September 19, 2022: DOJ topics for initial Dearie conference; Trump topics for initial Dearie conference

September 20, 2022: Trump 11th Circuit response; DOJ 11th Circuit reply

September 21, 2022: 11th Circuit opinion granting stay

September 22, 2022: Cannon order removing documents marked as classified from Seized Materials covered by her order; Dearie proposed work plan

September 23, 2022: Protective order; amended case management plan; motion for extension of time

September 25, 2022: Trump objections to Dearie order (released on September 28)

September 26, 2022: Sworn affidavit with more detailed inventory; Julie Edelstein

September 27, 2022: Dearie interim report; Staffing proposal; Government motion for extension and to adopt case management plan

September 28, 2022: Trump objection that DOJ didn’t ask for enough additional time

September 29, 2022: Cannon order alters Dearie work plan

September 30, 2022: DOJ motion to accelerate 11th Circuit appeal