Judging Freedom - Supreme Court REJECTS Trump_s emergency appeal

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Supreme Court REJECTS Trump's emergency appeal to let the special master review more than 100 classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti... #trump #supremecourt #SCOTUSSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, October 14, 2022. It's a little after 2 o'clock in the afternoon here on the East Coast. More news on the Donald Trump front, first involving the Supreme Court and second involving the January 6th Committee. Yesterday, the Supreme Court and second involving the January 6th Committee. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the president's effort to appeal a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which had reversed a decision of Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge in charge of his lawsuit against the DOJ as a consequence of the FBI execution of

a search warrant at the president's home in Mar-a-Lago. Just to bring you up to date on all of this, Judge Cannon appointed a special master. The special master said, I'm not going to review the classified documents because that's not what I'm hired to do. Judge Cannon overruled the special master, and at the same time she overruled the special master. She said to the DOJ, you can't use the classified documents, whether they were classified or unclassified. You can't use the documents that contain national security secrets in your investigation until the special master is finished with them. So she ordered the special master to review them, even though he said he didn't want to, and even though he's another federal judge who's the same rank and level as she is, that's unusual and bizarre,

but she's the boss in this case. He agreed to accept the special master gig, and he knows that means he is subject to his colleague, Judge Cannon, who, by the way, is young enough to be his granddaughter. Another story for another time. She, Judge Cannon, said to the feds, you can't conduct a criminal investigation using these documents until after the special master reviews them. The DOJ appealed that to the 11th Circuit, and the 11th Circuit reversed Judge Cannon and said two things. The DOJ can go ahead and use the documents it got from Trump voluntarily and that it seized from its home, all of them, which is now about 300 documents. This is interesting. The DOJ says there are 20,000 pages.

Trump's lawyers say there are 10 times as much, 200,000 pages. I don't know how there could be that kind of a discrepancy. We'll find out when the special master gives his report, which is due right after Thanksgiving, and he'll tell us how many pages he reviewed. So the 11th Circuit overruled Judge Cannon and said the DOJ can use all the documents they have in their investigation, and the special master does not have to review classified. Then Trump's people appealed half of that to the Supreme Court. In my opinion, the wrong half, but they appealed the half that said the special master does not need to look at the classified documents. If they really want to delay this, they should have appealed the part that said the DOJ can move

forward with their investigation, but they didn't. They're not the best lawyers in the world, and you've heard me say this before, the president is being underserved. Yesterday, the Supreme Court, after receiving a brief from Trump's lawyers and one from the DOJ, rejected the appeal. So the law of the case, as lawyers say it, the rules governing the case are now what the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled. To repeat, the special master does not have to review the documents that were marked classified or which are characterized as national defense information. And the DOJ can use all of these documents in its investigation. It can show them to witnesses. It can show them to intelligence analysts. And most threatening for the president,

it can show them to a grand jury. The other event that happened with President Trump yesterday was the January 6th committee in the House of Representatives held its last public hearing, at the end of which it voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify before the committee. He responded this morning with a 14-page letter. You can Google it and find it, look it up. It's a rant. It's a political rant, and it's filled with pictures of him and pictures of the crowd size that he drew on January 6th. It's not a mature, serious letter written by a lawyer objecting to a subpoena. To me, it's almost inconceivable that Trump would show up to testify. On the other hand, he's been complaining that they didn't call him, they didn't call any witnesses in his favor.

If he exercises some self-restraint, he could very well be his own best witness, but I don't think he'll do that. He will probably move to quash the subpoena, and by the time the courts resolve this, the committee will no longer exist. If the Democrats keep the House after November, the committee will certainly exist when the new House is organized in early January. If the Republicans take the House, it's a safe bet to say that the committee will not exist. What will the committee do? It will probably make criminal referrals, chief among which will be against the president, to the DOJ. Does the DOJ take these seriously? Well, yes and no. I mean, it looks at the evidence that Congress refers. It doesn't decide to indict just because Congress wants it. Under the Constitution,

thanks be to God, Congress can't indict. It can only investigate and legislate. But if the Congress gives the DOJ evidence about Trump or anybody else that the DOJ itself hasn't acquired from its own FBI, yes, it will use and evaluate that evidence and decide how, if at all, to use it. Not a good week for the former president, because he also was ordered to give a deposition in a civil case, a defamation case, in which a journalist by the name of, her name is now escaping me, claimed he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman female dressing room in the 1990s, and that he defamed her by calling her a liar. E. Jean Carroll, J-E-A-N Carroll is her name. He was sort of poo-pooing the litigation. He tried to get the DOJ to substitute itself as the defendant because he made this allegedly defamatory statement while he was the president of the United States

on the White House grounds during a White House press conference. But the courts have held that he's still a defendant. The DOJ is not a defendant. The DOJ does not represent him. His own lawyers represent him. And he's got to give a deposition. And it's in New York. And it's next Friday. More as we get it. If we don't get anything more in the next three or four hours, have a great weekend. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.