Judge postpones decision on whether Trump will get his special master
After a little over 90 minutes in a closed courtroom, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen M. Cannon refused to issue an opinion in court on whether or not Donald Trump will get a special master to review the documents he stole from the White House for any attorney/client privilege.
Speaking to MSNBC, former prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller's team, Andrew Weissmann said that the judge not seeing any urgency to rush to issue a special master from the bench is a "good sign" for the Justice Department.
Former Justice Department prosecutor Barbara McQuade also said that if the judge was going to find for Trump she would likely do it in a dramatic way that was public and would calm MAGA world. Her other observation is that the judge could have put a pause on everything pending her written ruling and she didn't do that either.
In court, the DOJ argued there is no need for a special master and that having one would only cause further delays in the criminal investigation, indicating that the prosecutors consider it a criminal investigation.
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Whether there is a special master or not, the case will still move forward with the Justice Department investigating the documents and how they got to Mar-a-Lago and who had access to them through security camera footage that observed people going into Trump's office and the storage room.
According to photos taken in the office, Trump's visitors in the room with the classified documents include Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, Kari Lake, Matt Gaetz, George Hamilton, Vanilla Ice, Alex Rodriguez, and The Nelk Boys.
Fingerprinting the documents will also distinguish who handled the documents outside of the former president.
CBS News' Steven Portnoy reported that at one point in the trial, the judge indicated prosecutors may be “overreading” Nixon v. GSA which said that the National Archives could take personal documents, archive them and return them to the president if they deemed private. Trump skipped the first step in his case.
Nixon had attempted to block his personal documents and the Oval Office recordings that implicated his involvement in the Watergate scandal. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Presidential Recordings and Material Preservation Act violated the presidential privilege of confidentiality.
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