Laughably bad
More lawyers say this ain’t law.
Legal scholars called Cannon’s ruling unprecedented, in the sense that it goes against decades of court precedent — especially expanding the special master role to include executive privilege potentially claimed by a former president over the executive branch, for government-owned documents the Justice Department argues Trump had no right to take or keep.
Surely to god “executive privilege” applies to current executives, not ones who have been booted out. Surely Trump doesn’t have any claim to “executive privilege” now – all the more so since on his way out he incited an insurrection.
This was “an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation,” University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck tells The New York Times. “Enjoining the ongoing criminal investigation is simply untenable,” agreed Paul Rosenzweig, a George W. Bush administration official.
“To any lawyer with serious federal criminal court experience who is being honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even flimsier,” Duke University law professor Samuel Buell tells the Times. “Donald Trump is getting something no one else ever gets in federal court, he’s getting it for no good reason, and it will not in the slightest reduce the ongoing howls that he is being persecuted, when he is being privileged.”
Even Barr scorns it.