Lawyers for President Trump and the DOJ are facing off in a hearing today over whether a federal judge should appoint a “special master” to review documents taken from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI. The hearing is scheduled for 1pm EST.
Attorneys for each side will debate a request from Trump’s lawyers that Judge Aileen M. Cannon appoint a “special master” to independently review documents the FBI took in the Mar-a-Lago raid, which may be subject to “executive privilege”.
The DOJ is claiming Trump’s request ‘lacked standing’ because the documents belong to the United States, not him.
Alina Habba (attorney for President Trump) Greg Jarrett (conservative news commentator, author, and attorney) and Pam Bondi (former Florida Attorney General) joined Hannity to discuss the DOJ’s response to Trump’s request.
Alina Habba told Hannity, “I think our papers are good. I’m looking forward to what the judge has to say tomorrow”.
“There has been a lot of public play and I really hope we can get the special master put in place so that we can have some impartial mediators to look at everything and get the documents that are supposed to be with the president back and look at everything in a perfect eye”, Habba said.
When asked by Hannity if people would know if the documents were classified or unclassified, Pam Bondi said, “They wouldn’t know, Sean, but President Trump would know, his legal team would know, the counsel’s office would know, and President Trump has said that he has declassified these materials. He was the President of the United States, and he has the right to do so.”
Jarrett told Hannity that the DOJ filing is ‘feeble and anemic’ and that ‘even a freshman law student would reject it as sound’.
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The Justice Department’s filing criticizing former President Trump’s request for a special master to sort out records seized during the FBI’s raid of his Palm Beach, Fla., Mar-a-Lago estate is “feeble and anemic,” Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said Wednesday.
Jarrett told “Hannity” that the filing, which claims among other things that Trump’s team has no standing to request a special master to view the seized documents, is something a freshman law student would reject as sound.
The department argued in the filing that Trump’s request for a special master “fails for multiple, independent reasons,” saying it’s both “unnecessary” and would “harm national security interests.”
“I read the court filing and I must say, it is one of the most feeble and anemic arguments by Merrick Garland that I think I’ve ever read in a court filing,” Jarrett said.
“No legal standing to go to court, he claims? My goodness, a first year law student knows that if you’re the target of a search and seizure, you have a constitutional right to go to court and argue a violation of the Fourth Amendment to either suppress it or at the very least have a special master review and segregate the material.”
“The other part of what was in the court filing by Garland was this crazy notion of obstruction of justice. What is that? You have to prove that a person acted corruptly and with an improper purpose in the United States Supreme Court has narrowed it further and said You have to act immorally with a depraved and evil purpose. Where is evidence of that?” he added.
