'Clearly wrong': Morning Joe rips Trump judge for 'bizarre' Mar-a-Lago order that 'harms national security'
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ripped a judge's ruling appointing a special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago and setting restrictions on the Department of Justice investigation.
District Court judge Aileen Cannon's ruling forbids the DOJ from presenting those seized materials before a grand jury or using the contents of the documents to conduct witness interviews, which essentially prevents the department from indicting Trump until the order is lifted, and the "Morning Joe" host was baffled and outraged.
"I hate to say it this way, as you know, as an attorney, you don't want to casts aspersions on judges -- maybe they know something you don't," Scarborough said. "I must say, though, reading the documents, looking at the pleadings, this ruling appears to be absolutely bizarre, and maybe I'm wrong, but I can tell you, every intel expert I talked to says this is really dangerous what she's done. You look at legal experts on both sides of the aisle -- from Donald Trump's own attorney general to law professors, all across the political spectrum -- people say she's clearly reading the law wrong, and doing it, intel experts say, in a way that can harm America's national security."
NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian said judges tended to defer to the executive branch on national security matters, because they typically lack the expertise of the FBI's counterintelligence division, but Cannon took control over the classified documents seized from the former president's home.
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"It's possible that this really just amounts to a speed bump and not a roadblock in this investigation because he could easily speed through the documents, find none of them are privileged and hand them over and the DOJ goes on its merry way," Dilanian said. "As a matter of law and precedent, it seems that the DOJ is going to appeal this because they think this is just a bad decision."
"We'll have to see what the 11th Circuit says in Atlanta, which is full of a majority of Trump-appointed judges, but most of the legal experts I've been talking to don't see it that way," Dilanian added. "They really are mystified, especially this idea that some of these classified documents could be subject to executive privilege to a former president. That's really never been tested in the law, there are Supreme Court decisions that seem to argue against that, so we'll have to wait and see. Again, the consensus in the legal community seems to be that this judge is on fairly thin ice here."
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