Donald Trump Is Going to Have to Find a New Way to Scam the Legal System

Earlier this year, Donald Trump scored a series of wins when he got a federal judge to essentially do his bidding for him regarding the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents. The first win came when that judge, Aileen Cannon granted Trump’s request for a special master to review the 11,000 government documents seized from Mar-a-Lago in August and blocked prosecutors from continuing to use the documents until the review was complete. The second, arguably even more absurd win happened a few weeks later when Cannon ruled that Trump did not have to comply with an order from the special master she’d just appointed instructing him to submit a sworn affidavit detailing exactly what he believed the FBI planted when it searched his home, a baseless claim he had been shouting about sans any evidence since the bureau had legally executed a search warrant at his for-profit club/private residence.

Not surprisingly, the legal community had thoughts about Cannon’s actions and they weren’t good. Of the initial installation of special master Raymond Dearie, Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor, told The New York Times: “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.” Of the decision to then let Trump ignore Dearie’s orders, constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe tweeted, “In the tank for Trump hardly describes it.” Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor, wrote that Cannon was “completely unfit to serve on the bench.”

And on Thursday, a court of appeals weighed in to basically say the same thing! Per Slate:

Judge Aileen Cannon’s intrusive and unjustifiable reign over the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Donald Trump is over. On Thursday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Cannon had no jurisdiction to hear Trump’s complaint in the first place. Its decision means that Cannon’s orders are void, and everything she had done—including the appointment and oversight of a special master—must be undone. The special master must be dismissed, and Cannon must relinquish all control over this dispute. Any other outcome, the court explained, would constitute “a radical reordering of our caselaw” that violates “bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.” It is a complete victory for the Justice Department and a vindication of the principle that judges may not rewrite the law to run interference for the president who appointed them.

The opinion was issued by a three-judge panel of conservatives; Chief Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher, who were appointed by none other than Donald Trump. And in a professional lowlight that Cannon will probably want to erase from her résumé, basically every line is an incredibly harsh review of her work. For example, the introduction, which simply reads: “This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation. The answer is no.” Elsewhere, the panel calls Cannon’s granting of a special master a “dramatic and unwarranted” intervention that she had no authority to make and says that, on more than one occasion, she “stepped in with [her] own reasoning,” which was clearly flawed. As legal journalist Chris Geidner put it, “I would simply not leave the house ever again if a panel of fellow-traveler judges did this to me in an opinion.”

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “The decision could not be more emphatic, or more devastating to both” Cannon and Trump; the latter “has lost the benefit of a special master slowing down the federal probe into his alleged misconduct,” as well as “his closest judicial ally in the fight.”

Last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee both the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s decision to take classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and key aspects of its investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, citing Trump’s decision to run for president for a third time. A final decision on whether or not to criminally prosecute Trump will ultimately come from Garland.