June 9, 2023

Trump case update

Former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal indictment will be overseen — at least initially — by a federal judge whom a higher court criticized for a series of rulings that were unusually favorable to Mr. Trump during the early stages of the investigation, according to five people familiar with the matter.

A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer was sentenced Thursday to three years in federal prison for keeping classified documents at his home and other unauthorized locations.

Guardian - A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump who last year drew scrutiny for a ruling that was seen as deferential to the former president may oversee proceedings in the case over his possession of classified documents, a source familiar with the summons told the Guardian.  US district judge Aileen Cannon has been listed on the summons sent to Trump’s lawyers, the source said. You may remember the Florida-based juror’s name from last year, when she granted a request from Trump’s attorneys to appoint a special master to review the records federal agents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August. The special master review delayed the justice department’s investigation into the materials and how they ended up at Trump’s south Florida property, but in December, Cannon’s decision was overturned by the unanimous decision of a federal appeals court.

US News - Trump's lawyers say the selective prosecution is part of a larger pattern of prosecutorial misconduct, though they have provided few details beyond claiming that investigators violated a legal doctrine that permits people to keep communications with their lawyers private. The legal hurdles to proving selective prosecution are high. Legal experts say such claims are usually doomed because defendants must prove that they were intentionally singled out for arbitrary reasons and that prosecutors declined to bring charges against others in similar circumstances. Unlike Trump, Biden and Pence immediately returned the records and cooperated with efforts to search for additional documents. The Justice Department is investigating the Biden matter and dropped a separate probe of Pence on June 1.

Robert Reich -  Trump and his defenders — and there will be many (such as nearly every lawmaker in the Republican Party) — will argue that Joe Biden and Mike Pence did the same as Trump did, and yet only Trump is being subject to a Justice Department indictment.

Rubbish. Biden and Pence sought to cooperate with authorities; Trump tried to thwart them. Biden and Pence came forward to volunteer that they had found classified documents among their private possessions. Trump appears to have done everything possible to hold on to the classified documents — denying he had them, hiding them from public officials charged with retrieving them, and then, after a subpoena was served on him to produce them, secretly moving them from a Mar-a-Lago storage area. 

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