BENCHSLAP: Eleventh Circuit Sh*tcans Trump Special Master In Withering Takedown Of Lower Court Ruling

That's going to leave a mark.

trump sad

(Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

Last night, the Eleventh Circuit delivered the expected death blow to the special master review of documents seized August 8 at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club pursuant to a judicially authorized warrant. The appellate panel of two Trump appointed jurists and conservative “Dubya” appointee Chief Judge William Pryor held that the trial court abused its discretion in arrogating to itself jurisdiction over the seized materials. It was a total humiliation for US District Judge Aileen Cannon, who bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wanted, even when his lawyers failed to plead it cogently, or at all.

“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 per curiam opinion begins. “The answer is no.”

The issue here, as it was during the emergency appeal when the appellate panel reversed the prohibition on the Justice Department using the seized classified documents in its criminal investigation, is the standard to invoke equitable jurisdiction. And indeed the four-factor test laid out in Richey v. Smith is no more satisfied with the rest of the seized stuff than it was for the top secret documents Trump stuck in his luggage and stashed in his pool locker.

Most importantly, there’s been no argument that the essential first factor, “callous disregard” for the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, has been met here. Trump’s lawyer Jim Trusty invented an alternate reality in which a plaintiff gets to examine the underlying affidavit and litigate the character of each item seized in an effort to determine if the search was lawful. But that’s not how any of this goes!

“Plaintiff’s lawyers claimed at oral argument that the special master process is necessary to determine whether a constitutional violation happened,” the court writes. “This justification finds no support in our precedent and would result in a dramatic and unwarranted expansion of equitable jurisdiction.”

Because if they allow Trump to get a special master review of a judicially authorized warrant absent any indication that the search was illegal, then there will be nothing anomalous about this so-called anomalous jurisdiction. Either this relief will be available to everyone, or the court can follow Judge Cannon’s plan and magic up a rule that applies only to former presidents.

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In considering these arguments, we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; drastically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. So the case must be dismissed.

To say the panel was unimpressed with Judge Cannon’s reasoning would be a gross understatement. At one point they note that she was “undeterred by [the] lack of information” supporting Trump’s claim to have a pressing need to get his Celine Dion photos back pronto. But the judges seemed patently appalled that a federal judge would find fear of criminal prosecution to be a legally cognizable interest in property seized pursuant to a warrant.

“No doubt the threat of prosecution can weigh heavily on the mind of anyone under investigation,” they note incredulously. “But without diminishing the seriousness of the burden, that ordinary experience cannot support extraordinary jurisdiction.”

In short, it was a total beatdown. Finding that the lower court “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction,” the panel vacated the September 5 special master appointment in its entirety and remanded the case with an order for Judge Cannon to dismiss. They stayed the order for a week to allow Trump to try his luck with the Supreme Court, which already declined to intervene regarding the classified documents.

Meanwhile over at Truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

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“When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?” he screeched into the ether.

Hey, Special Counsel Jack Smith … you up?

Trump v. United States [Docket via Court Listener]


Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.