UPDATED: DOJ attack foiled by Cannonade

Yesterday Walt opined that, if anything at all has come out of the FBI invasion of President Trump's Mar-a-Lago home,  it's that the Donald, like most of us, doesn't stay on top of his filing! 

That, and only that. You would think that if Biden's Department of Injustice had anything more -- a smoking gun, a "threat to national ssecurity", anything at all -- to prove that they were right to violate the Fourth Amendment, they would be happy to show us. Right? 

Errr, no. They have fought every step of the way to keep everything -- the search warrant, the affidavit on which it was bassed, the details of what was seized -- under wraps.

Today, the DOJ lost another round. Judge Aileen Cannon granted President Trump's request that a Special Master -- an officer of the court -- review the documents to weed out from the rest of the investigation any that might be protected by claims of attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

Judge Cannon's order came despite the strenuous objections of the Justice Department, which said an outside legal expert was not necessary in part because officials had already completed their review of potentially privileged documents! In other words, "We've already looked at them, so you can't make us forget what we've seen."

In a clear win for President Trump's legal team, the judge said (in effect) "Oh yes, I can!" She temporarily halted the DOJ's use of the records for "investigative" (read: frame-up) purposes. Some of those records may ultimately be returned to Mr Trump, but Judge Cannon put off ruling on that question.

Meanwhile, we get closer and closer to the 2022 mid-term elections. When the Jan 6 Circus failed to sink the Trump Republicans in the polls, the Dumbocrats resported to the police state-style raid on Mar-a-Lago, hoping the FBI could do what the Congressional committee couldn't. As Nelson Muntz sez, HA-ha!

Further reading: "FBI Says The Documents In Trump’s Possession Were So Classified They Were Printed With Invisible Ink On Invisible Paper", Babylon Bee (natch!), 4/9/22. 

UPDATE ADDED 8/9/22: In desperate damage control mode, the DOJ first tried planting a "leak" in WAPO (where else?) saying that amongst the seized documents there was one (1) detailing sensitive information about "an ally's" military capabilities.

That didn't work, so today the DOJ filed an appeal of Judge Cannon's ruling, asking her to let them continue fishing in the same pond -- about 100 classified documents -- because, they say, Mr Trump’s team "may not have returned all the classified records removed from the White House at the end of his presidency." 

The prosecutors also asked the judge not to allow the Special Master to review the classified materials seized from the Trump home. Walt wonders, wasn't the whole purpose of the middle-of-the-night raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover the documents that allegedly were not returned? Does this appeal mean the DOJ admits that they might have missed some? Or does it mean that they didn't succeed in planting anything incriminating in the dozens of boxes they took away? 

President Trump, in a posting on his Truth Social platform, described the request as a waste of money. Taxpayers, that's your money he's talking about! Keep that in mind in November.