Chorus of Legal Experts Denounce Trump-Appointed Judge’s Ruling on Seized Documents

Legal experts have thoroughly condemned U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s Monday decision to prevent the U.S. Department of Justice from using materials obtained during the FBI’s legally authorized search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in its ongoing criminal investigation until a special master reviews the documents.

Cannon—a Trump appointee who the Senate Republicans confirmed after he lost the 2020 election—argued in her ruling that the DOJ should be “temporarily enjoined” from examining the more than 11,000 government records seized last month, some of which were marked “top secret,” while an as-yet-unnamed special master reviews them for “material subject to claims of attorney-client and/or executive privilege.”

As MSNBC‘s Steve Benen wrote Tuesday, “The idea that executive privilege is even at play, in this case, is genuinely weird.”

“At issue are documents that belong to the federal government, not to Trump,” Benen noted. “What’s more, the former president is a private citizen with no executive authority, so he can’t exert power he doesn’t have to hold materials that aren’t his.”

Cannon’s order blocks federal prosecutors from analyzing the seized materials “for criminal investigative purposes” even as it allows other government officials to keep scrutinizing them “for purposes of intelligence classification and national security assessments.”

Several critics lambasted Cannon—a 41-year-old member of the arch-conservative Federalist Society who quickly established her reputation as a far-right jurist—on Twitter.

University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck called Cannon’s ruling “preposterous” and described Monday as “a sad day” for the federal judiciary.

Andrew Weissman, a law professor at New York University who previously spent 20 years with the Justice Department, characterized the ruling as “nutty.” Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, called it “utterly lawless.”

According to former U.S. acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, “This special master opinion is so bad it’s hard to know where to begin.”

As Benen pointed out, “Cannon said at the outset that she was inclined to give Team Trump what it wanted, but she thought it best to give the Justice Department an opportunity to make its case.”

“When prosecutors did exactly that in devastating fashion,” he added, “the Trump-appointed judge ignored them and issued a ruling legal scholars are hard pressed to defend.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org.