Thread: Trump steals nuclear secrets.

No doubt Trump will be calling this another witch hunt which is strangely appropriate in the way he has "bewitched" the naive, the intellectually indolent and the feeble minded.

I'm loving this, especially since Trump demanded it and is paying for it. He must be livid. first the special master told him to provide proof he had declassified any documents then proof that the FBI had planted documents.
He must have like "WTF ???"

Giant Backfire’: Trump’s Demand for Special Master Is Looking Like a Mistake
The former president failed to derail the criminal investigation into his hoarding of sensitive documents and is stuck paying for a costly process that threatens to undermine his public claims.
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump’s request that a judge intervene in the criminal investigation into his hoarding of government documents by appointing a special master increasingly looks like a significant blunder, legal experts say.

“Maybe from Trump’s point of view, creating delay and chaos is always a plus, but this has the feel of a giant backfire,” said Peter M. Shane, a legal scholar in residence at New York University and a specialist in separation-of-powers law.

Initially, Mr. Trump’s demand that an outside arbiter sift through the materials the F.B.I. seized from his Florida estate seemed to turn in his favor. His lawsuit was assigned to a judge he had appointed, Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida, who surprised legal experts by granting his request.

In naming a special master suggested by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, she effectively froze the Justice Department’s investigation and gave the arbiter a broad mandate. The judge, Raymond J. Dearie of Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York, would filter the materials not just for attorney-client privilege, which is not unusual, but also for executive privilege, which is unprecedented.

But Mr. Trump’s apparent triumph would prove short-lived. An appeals court ruling last week and a letter the Justice Department filed late Tuesday about subsequent complaints his legal team had filed under seal to Judge Dearie suggest that the upsides to obtaining a special master are eroding and the disadvantages swelling.

James Trusty, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, did not respond to a request for comment. But late Wednesday, the Trump team refiled its complaints to Judge Dearie — a letter dated Sept. 25 — in unsealed form, bringing the tensions more clearly into view.

The appeals court last week freed the Justice Department to resume using about 100 documents marked as classified in its investigation, while telegraphing that the court thought Judge Cannon likely had erred by appointing a special master.
In blocking part of Judge Cannon’s order, the appeals court panel, including two Trump appointees, allowed investigators to again scrutinize the material that poses by far the gravest legal threat to Mr. Trump. Potential crimes include unlawful retention of national security secrets, obstruction and defying a subpoena demanding all sensitive records that remained in his possession.

But the Justice Department acquiesced for now to the remainder of the special master process, meaning that an outside arbiter would still assess some 11,000 unclassified records and other items seized from Mr. Trump’s Florida compound, Mar-a-Lago. A second letter from Mr. Trusty on Wednesday said that amounts to nearly 200,000 pages of material.

Since that review is no longer delaying or diverting the criminal inquiry, it is not clear what benefits remain for Mr. Trump.

For one, a special master will cost a lot of money. Judge Cannon rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal that taxpayers should foot half the bill of the review, instead saying he would be solely responsible.

That includes the full cost of a vendor who will scan all the materials, as well as support staff for Judge Dearie, like an assistant who bills $500 an hour. Mr. Trump will also have to pay his own lawyers’ fees as they filter thousands of pages of records and then litigate disputes about which ones can be withheld as privileged.
And far from indulging Mr. Trump, as his lawyers likely hoped in suggesting his appointment, Judge Dearie appears to be organizing the document review in ways that threaten to swiftly puncture the former president’s defenses.

For example, the judge has ordered Mr. Trump to submit by Friday a declaration or affidavit verifying the inventory or listing any items on it “that plaintiff asserts were not seized” in the search.

But if Mr. Trump acknowledges that the F.B.I. took any documents marked as classified from his personal office and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, as the inventory says, that would become evidence that could be used against him if he were later charged with defying a subpoena.

Requiring Mr. Trump’s lawyers to verify or object to the inventory also effectively means making them either affirm in court or disavow a claim Mr. Trump has made in public: his accusation that the F.B.I. planted fake evidence. While it is not a crime to lie to Fox News viewers or on social media, there are consequences to lying to a court.

nytimes.com

NEW HABERMAN SCOOP: Trump Told Aides He Would Trade Documents He Took To Mar-a-Lago For FBI’s Russia Files

New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman has dropped a new scoop: former President Donald Trump wanted to barter the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago for the FBI’s files on the Trump/Russia investigation.


Haberman has been making the rounds to promote the release of her controversial but much-buzzed-about book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

But she has also found time to drop scoop after scoop about the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump for crimes involving the Espionage Act after thousands of documents — some bearing classified markings — were seized from his home in August.


On Saturday, Haberman and Michael Schmidt dropped a new one, reporting that Trump effectively wanted to use the Mar-a-Lago documents as hostages — to procure other secret documents:


Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims.


In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.


Mr. Trump’s aides never pursued the idea. But the episode is one in a series that demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.

MORE Trump Wanted To Trade Documents He Took For FBI Russia Files