Judging Freedom - Trump Lawyers & the Special Master

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, September 29th, 2022. It's about 3.35 in the afternoon here before the special master appointed by the federal judge in the case of Donald J. Trump versus the United States of America. Those are the efforts by former President Trump to challenge the FBI execution of a search warrant in his home and to force the government to filter all of their documents through a special master. He's won some of that and he's lost some of that. As you know, the federal judge to whom the case was assigned agreed to appoint a special master. And as you probably know, a special master is usually a retired judge or a well-respected lawyer who will receive the documents from the agency that seized them. Could be local police, could be state officials, in this case the FBI,

and go through them one by one and make certain that nothing is in there that shouldn't have been seized. How do we know what should have been seized? Well, the special master has a copy of the search warrant that was issued by another federal judge. In this case, Donald Trump applied for the special master too late. The government had already gone through, for the most part, everything that it found. When Judge Eileen Cannon, the judge to whom the case was assigned, appointed the special master, she blocked the Department of Justice from using and reviewing or a subpoena from a grand jury in Washington that's been investigating all of this. The remaining 100 are the documents that were actually seized by the FBI in that now infamous execution of the search warrant at his home that Monday morning, now seven or eight weeks ago. So Judge Cannon appointed the special master. The special master is a senior status federal judge, sort of semi-retired, still a judge with all the authority of a judge,

still hearing cases, but hearing a smaller caseload. By the name of Raymond Deary, Judge Deary sits in Brooklyn, known as the Eastern District of New York. Judge Deary was actually agreed to by both the lawyers for former President Trump and the DOJ. Judge Deary ordered the DOJ to give a list of the documents to himself and to the Trump lawyers, which they did. He then ordered the Trump lawyers to say, all right, the president, the former president has been saying that the FBI planted documents in this list. So go through the list and tell me what is planted. And of course, Trump's lawyers are declining to do that. They're basically saying to the special master, you're exceeding your authority under the order that appointed you. Well, he's a federal judge

also. He's not exceeding his authority. He's trying to get a handle on what's going on. So when we were originally told that the FBI seized 11,000 documents, they did. But these documents obviously were longer than one page each because the DOJ estimates that there's 200,000 individual pages for the special master to review. So before he began his review, he said, I'm not going to look at the stuff that's classified. Judge Cannon was overruled by an appeals court, which basically said the DOJ can keep what is classified. So the classified stuff, the national defense information is not going to be reviewed by the special master and it's not going to be turned over to Trump's lawyers. But Trump's lawyers are now saying,

hey, Judge Deary, the special master, you can't force us to back up the claims that our client's been making on television. That's where we are now. Trump told my former colleagues at Fox very recently, the FBI planted stuff, whereupon Judge Deary said, okay, I have 200,000 document pages here, I have 11,000 documents, tell me what was planted and Trump's lawyers won't do it. That probably means that they are unable to identify what the former president claims was planted or the former president's claim was a PR claim and not a legal one. This is the danger of representing a public figure when the public figure thinks that he or she can affect the outcome of the litigation by public statements.

That is harmful for a litigant to make a statement in public that the lawyers cannot back up in the courtroom. Everything said in a courtroom is either under oath by a witness or a good faith representation that it is true by a lawyer. If a lawyer won't say something, then he can't make the good faith representation that it was true. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.