Posts

Ransacked! 120 Minutes before 11th Circuit Hearing, Trump Attempts to Create a Fourth Amendment Injury

Less than two hours before the 11th Circuit hearing that may result in Judge Aileen Cannon being reversed for intervening in the Trump investigation, Trump’s attorneys (notably excluding Chris Kise) filed a motion for access to the affidavit for his search.

That this is a transparent attempt to give Judge Cannon some basis to intervene in both the Special Master review and the 11th Circuit appeal has not stopped reporters from treating it as a reasonable request.

It’s not.

Even if all the claims made in it were true, it still wouldn’t provide basis to give Trump the affidavit that (among other things) identifies who he could retaliate against for cooperating with investigators.

One of the most important paragraphs (and footnote) is this one.

Moreover, Plaintiff’s counsel has reviewed most of the seized materials over the last several weeks. The fact the Government took a huge volume of personal and family photographs, newspapers, thank-you notes, campaign materials, books, and golf shirts demonstrates that this search and seizure was nothing more than a general ransacking. 7 This raises serious questions about how the affiant characterized his or her assertion of probable cause and the justification for seizing thousands of personal and private items. Plaintiff must have an opportunity to review the affidavit and determine whether the Fourth Amendment was respected, intentionally subverted, or recklessly violated by a DOJ bent on getting its nose under the Mar-a-Lago tent.

7 A general rummaging through the belongings of President Trump is a particularly ominous moment in law enforcement history. With DOJ and some state officials engaging in various efforts to investigate President Trump, the search smacks of pretextual conduct with hopes of feeding personal documents to prosecutors or agents who might find use for them in unrelated pursuits. Authorization to seize “any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes” is an invitation to “rummage,” which every court has recognized as barred under the Fourth Amendment. See Andresen v. Maryland, 427 U.S. 463, 480 (1976) (quoting Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 467 (1971)). [my emphasis]

Start with the books and sweaty golf shirts. According to a part of the affidavit that Trump has not contested (the highlighted items below are the ones that changed with an updated inventory), the FBI seized a total of 33 books in the search on August 8, across 33 items seized; the bulk, 23, were all in one box together. That box was likely close to another that had multiple Top Secret documents, as well as a book. Those books got seized because they were next to stolen Top Secret documents. There was likewise a piece of clothing or a gift the box with stolen Top Secret documents. And altogether, there were just 19 gifts or pieces of clothing seized.

That’s what Trump wants you to think amounts to a ransacking.

Many of the other items are actually things about which there is an active dispute before Raymond Dearie (as noted in this filing).

For purposes of the yellow-highlighted Disputes, the Special Master will see that three issues account for the overwhelming majority of disputes. From the government’s perspective, the three conceptual issues are:

1. Annotations. – Books, magazine articles, and newspaper clippings with markings are original Presidential records.

2. Thank you notes for presidential acts or events. – Thank you notes reflecting gratitude for acts taken in the course of official duties are Presidential records.

3. Briefing book compilations with indexes. – Briefing material and other work product prepared by presidential staff for the President are Presidential records.

Trump wants to claim press clippings on which he made annotations are personal; the Presidential Records Act says otherwise. Trump wants to claim that thank you notes sent to him in his role as President are personal; the Presidential Records Act says otherwise.

Among the campaign materials taken were several letters written by Kurt Hilbert about stealing the election in Georgia, as well as something written by Cleta Mitchell. Sure, those are campaign materials. They are also evidence of a crime. They were also returned already, and could have been returned earlier had Judge Cannon not intervened.

Trump’s claim that it is unusual for the FBI to seize personal materials as part of a search warrant (bolded above) is particularly ridiculous, not least because Plain View doctrine clearly says that DOJ can refer items seized with a warrant for prosecution.

But it’s particularly notable given this language in the order appointing Jack Smith.

The Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation ofthese matters. The Special Counsel is also authorized to refer to the appropriate United States Attorney discrete prosecutions that may arise from the Special Counsel’s investigation.

It permits Smith to refer things for further prosecution, including (presumably) any evidence of a crime he sees in the materials seized from Mar-a-Lago.

At this late hour, after being reversed once already, Judge Cannon is unlikely to get further over her skis.

But it likely will come up in the hearing starting in (now) 45 minutes, so Jim Trusty can claim, for the first time, that there has been a Fourth Amendment violation that merits Judge Cannon’s intervention under Richey.

Update: Even though improper to do so procedurally, Trusty did raise this argument, over and over at the hearing (he even complained that the FBI had taken Trump’s Celine Dion photo). That led both William Pryor and Britt Grant to observe that Trump’s argument kept changing over the course of the litigation before the 11th Circuit. Sopan Joshi, arguing for DOJ, laid out five such changes.

More importantly, the Chief Judge of the 11th Circuit noted that the reason so many personal items were seized is because Trump chose to store stolen classified records with his personal belongings.

You’ve talked about all these other records and property that were seized. The problem is the search warrant was for classified documents and boxes and other items that are intermingled with that. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of the government if someone has intermingled classified documents and all kinds of other personal property.

I don’t think Judge Cannon will be in a position to act on this motion for very long, but I think this comment from Pryor would give her pause before she did so anyway.

On Trump’s Subpoena and Marc Short’s Testimony

The January 6 Committee conducted what may be the last of their hearings (barring new disclosures from witnesses they intend to recall, including, implicitly, Tony Ornato and Robert Engel) by voting to subpoena Trump, for both documents and testimony. The subpoena was proposed by Liz Cheney, who learned a thing or two about bureaucratic genius from her father.

I think the most likely outcome of that will be the expiration of the subpoena with the next Congress. With the likelihood Republicans will take the House, it will not be renewed. It will, however, give the Committee opportunity to package up their findings against Trump in something that’s not a referral.

And the full House may have to vote on the subpoena before the expiration of this Congress.

The subpoena is more interesting, in my opinion, for the way it might intersect with other investigations. For example, a subpoena to Trump for January 6 documents might cover some of the documents initially seized on August 8. As I have noted, there appear to be documents in both the materials already returned to Trump and those currently under dispute before Raymond Dearie that pertain to Trump’s big lies pertaining to Georgia.

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.

A subpoena for these documents may change the legal status of them — and Trump’s hoarding of them at his beach resort. It may also make them easier for others to obtain.

As it happens, though, the subpoena news also came on the same day that Marc Short testified to a grand jury about topics he (and his Executive Authority maximalist lawyer Emmet Flood) originally declined to answer.

A former top aide to Vice President Mike Pence returned before a grand jury Thursday to testify in a criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election after federal courts overruled President Donald Trump’s objections to the testimony, according to people familiar with the matter.

In a sealed decision that could clear the way for other top Trump White House officials to answer questions before a grand jury, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled that former Pence chief of staff Marc Short probably possessed information important to the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol that was not available from other sources, one of those people said.

[snip]

According to people familiar with the matter, Short had appeared before a grand jury in downtown Washington in July, but declined to answer certain questions after Flood argued the communications of top White House advisers are protected — and presented written documentation from Trump’s lawyers that they were asserting executive privilege.

The Justice Department asked the court to intervene, urging Howell to override Trump’s claim and to compel Short to answer questions about his communications with Trump, one person said. After arguments Sept. 22, Howell granted the government’s motion, the people said, but because the investigation and an appeal are ongoing, it is unclear if or when a redacted opinion will become public.

Short and Windom were spotted at court again on Thursday, as was former Trump national security and defense aide Kash Patel.

SCOTUS has already ruled against Trump’s Executive Privilege claims before the January 6 Committee. If they were able to obtain his testimony — or if DOJ took his 14-page conspiratorial rant authored by former OAN hostess as a false statement to Congress — then it would create interesting tension between these two investigations.

As DOJ gets testimony from Short and, after him, others who invoked Executive Privilege, this subpoena to Trump will be in the background, a (very distant) possibility that Trump would be required to testify — as a witness, as opposed to the subject Trump is in the DOJ investigation — to the very same topics that his top aides are now testifying to.

It’s one more moving part that may get increasingly difficult to juggle.

Judge Aileen Cannon Treated a Public Letter about Trump’s Health as More Sensitive than America’s National Security

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.