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Rumors that Chris Kise, Trump’s actually competent Florida lawyer has been “sidelined” have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, NBC’s Marc Caputo reports that Kise is now of counsel at Continental PLLC, a Florida law firm stacked with Republican heavy hitters, including Carlos Trujillo, Trump’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, and Jesus M. Suarez, a former chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to represent conservatives who were shunned by Big Law,” Suarez told NBC. “The fact that there’s a segment of the legal establishment that won’t represent a former president of the United States because they disagree with his political views is antithetical to the practice of law.”
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The fact that lawyers like to get paid and may be a little squicked out at the prospect of being forced to make nonsensical arguments in court because some weirdo in a spandex dress shirt convinced Trump that it was totally cool to tell the National Archives to get bent when it asked him to give back government documents he stuck in his suitcase on the way out of the White House. There’s also the very real possibility of finding yourself in a grand jury’s crosshairs after telling, umm, untruths to the FBI on your famously mendacious client’s behalf.
In the event, Kise and his Continental colleague Lazaro Fields were able to thread the needle with their latest love note to Justice Thomas asking the Supreme Court to vacate the Eleventh Circuit’s stay insofar as it blocks special master Judge Raymond Dearie from reviewing classified documents. It’s a Trump legal filing, so it’s still nutty, referring consistently to “President” Trump, “purported classified records,” and “a potentially unlawful search and seizure,” despite no one claiming that the warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 was in any wise defective.
And it leans heavily into the fact that Judge Dearie was on the FISA court and is thus competent to review classified documents, while eliding the fact that they’re asking for Trump’s legal team to get eyes on Top Secret classified data as well. This distinction was not lost on Judge Dearie, who noted at the September 20 conference, “If I can make my judgments without — I don’t want to see the material — it’s presumably sensitive material. If I can make my recommendation to Judge Cannon, right or wrong, without exposing myself or to you to that material, I will do it.”
But, to give credit where due, the relief demanded from SCOTUS by Kise and Lazaro (as well as loon squad lawyers Lindsey Halligan and Jim Trusty) is pretty narrow and based on not-entirely-insane legal reasoning. They argue that Judge Cannon’s order was not appealable under § 1292, not subject to pendent appellate jurisdiction, and not a collateral order, and thus the Eleventh Circuit lacked jurisdiction to review it. The appellate panel reasoned that enjoining the Justice Department from using the classified documents in its criminal investigation was immediately appealable, and that the special master review process was inextricable from that injunction.
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Trump counters that Judge Dearie wasn’t even appointed when prosecutors noticed their appeal, and argues that the Circuit lacked jurisdiction to enjoin his review as a third party.
“To the extent the appointment impliedly requires the Government to act, the Special Master Order does not have a ‘direct or irreparable impact on the merits of the controversy,’” they write, adding that “providing documents to a special master is not the ultimate relief sought—it is an intermediary procedural step to conduct an orderly, transparent, and fair review of the seized materials.”
Which isn’t a totally crazy argument.
“This is what good lawyers who are stuck do to appease bad clients,” notes Steve Vladeck on Twitter, calling it “a way of filing *something* in the Supreme Court without going all the way to crazytown and/or acting unethically.”
Which is a big step up from the piles of drek Halligan and Trusty have docketed when left to their own devices, so … good job?
Justice Thomas has requested a reply from the government by Tuesday, a pace which does not suggest that he thinks this is an emergency requiring his immediate attention. Meanwhile the Eleventh Circuit, has expedited briefing of the DOJ’s appeal of Judge Cannon’s order in its entirety, over Trusty and Kise’s protest that they were “engaged fully in performing the tasks required under the expedited Special Master schedule.” Of course they followed that up by immediately docketing that 296-page SCOTUS pleading. Plus Trusty and Halligan somehow managed to find time to file Trump’s insane clown defamation suit against CNN for calling him a fascist.
But the important thing is that Trump didn’t get cancel cultured out of being able to use hundreds of millions of dollars hoovered up from donors to pay for competent representation who will demand with a straight face that their client receive a version of “due process” wildly out of step with what is provided to literally any other person in America.
So God bless, we guess.
Boutique law firm in Miami joins Trump’s legal fight after others steer clear [NBC]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.