The MeidasTouch Podcast - Trump Appointed Federal Judge Makes VERY ODD ruling in new Mar-a-Lago Search Case

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

On The Mighty, we feature some of the most impactful responses, reactions, narratives, musings, and rants of Meidas content creators. New episodes of the traditional MeidasTouch Podcast drop every Tuesday and Friday morning. The rest of the week, we deliver The Mighty! Judge Aileen Cannon, an Article III Federal Judge appointed by Trump on 2020, made an unusual ruling that she “intends” to appoint a special master in connection with the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Judge Cannon is not the judge who signed the warrant. That judge is Magistrate Judge Reinhart. Trump has made no filings before Judge Reinhart despite the search warrant having been issued three weeks ago and so it is likely the FBI has already reviewed all of the records. Judge Cannon has given the government until August 30 to respond despite the fact that the government has not even been served. Shop Meidas Merch at: https://store.meidastouch.com Remember to subscribe to ALL the Meidas Media Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 The Influence Continuum: https://pod.link/1603773245 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 The Weekend Show: https://pod.link/1612691018 The Tony Michaels Podcast: https://pod.link/1561049560 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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this is brett micellis co-founder of Midas touch and you are listening to the mighty on the mighty we feature some of the most impactful responses, reactions, narratives, musings, and rants of Midas content creators. New episodes of the podcast I do with my brothers drop every Tuesday and Friday morning. The rest of the week, we deliver The Mighty. As more news comes out about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the seizure of our top secret documents, things just keep getting worse for Donald Trump. And with his back against the wall, Trump is becoming increasingly unhinged and desperate. But in a bizarre and very odd turn of events over the weekend, a Trump-appointed federal judge stated her preliminary intent to appoint a special master, as requested by Donald Trump. So what does it all mean? There's

plenty of confusion. So let's bring in Midas Touch co-founder and attorney Ben Micellis to make sense of this very odd ruling. Ben, take it away. This is Ben Micellis from the Midas Touch Network. The federal judge in the Southern District of Florida, Judge Eileen Cannon, where Donald Trump filed what was called a motion for judicial oversight and additional relief. Remember, he opened up this new case, didn't file in the case where the magistrate judge signed and executed the search warrant in the Southern District of Florida, filed this new case. I've never heard of such a motion and no real lawyers have ever heard of a motion for judicial oversight and additional relief. Well, this Trump-appointed

judge, Eileen Cannon, reviewed the submission, which by the way was never even served on the Department of Justice, and made a very odd order and said it would be her intent to appoint a special master subject to giving the government an opportunity to be heard, which a hearing is going to be set for September 1 at 1 p.m. Eastern at the West Palm Courthouse in Florida, but that the intent would be to appoint a special master subject to that oral argument. Let me rewind a little bit here and just try to frame the context and explain to you why this is so weird. Many legal observers are just saying they never even heard of an order like this before and that this order makes no legal sense at all, that there's really no authority for this order. It's not really going to make a difference at all, and I'll explain to

you why that all of the issues addressed in this order are likely going to be completely moot, but let me rewind and frame this issue so you understand it. So Judge Reinhart is a magistrate judge. Magistrate judges are the ones who are tasked with signing off on search warrants that are executed, like the one that was executed on Mar-a-Lago. Reinhart is a magistrate in the Southern District of Florida. Magistrates are not Article III judges. They are judges who are appointed by the federal bench for the purpose of doing certain tasks, and one of those tasks are signing off on search warrants like the one here. And so Judge Reinhart, the magistrate judge, signed off on the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago on August 5th. The search warrant was executed on the following Monday, on August 8th, where we all learned that the search took place.

Two weeks passed. Donald Trump didn't file any motions before Judge Reinhart, didn't ask Judge Reinhart to appoint a special master, didn't ask Judge Reinhart for any relief at all. And so in those two weeks since the FBI executed the search warrant, the FBI had their own what's called a kind of taint team or filter team, people who would look through documents for any potential privilege. Where there's not privilege, turn those documents over to the FBI team investigating the crimes, in this case, Espionage Act obstruction, and the concealment and mutilation charge, all which carry very stiff prison sentences. And then that team would review it. And because two weeks now, three weeks have passed since the search, the government's likely already reviewed every single one of these records. And Trump didn't challenge any of that. And Trump's lawyers in the Judge Reinhart case

didn't even file to unseal the affidavit. It was actually the media that filed that motion. So Trump did nothing there. Instead, his legal team filed a motion that, again, legal observers don't even know what this is, a motion for judicial oversight and additional relief. And they were asking for an injunction, but they didn't file an actual injunction, which has elements where you have to attach affidavits and declarations under penalty of perjury. You have to establish irreparable harm, a probability of success on the merits. You can't just write love letters to a court and then ask the court to do things. You have to follow very specific rules. So one of the things that Trump asked

in this other case that they opened up before a federal Article 3 judge, a different judge than Judge Reinhart, they filed a separate case last Monday. So two weeks after, now we're getting to three weeks after, but more than two weeks after they filed before Judge Eileen Cannon, who's a judge who Trump appointed to get that role on the federal bench. And they asked for Judge Cannon to have the federal government stop reviewing the documents, number one. Number two, to appoint a special master. And a special master is just an independent person that is selected by the court. It's usually a retired judge or a private practicing attorney, but someone who will go through the documents in a search and will prepare a report for the court and say, these

documents are privileged, these documents are not privileged. And really, when it comes to appointing a special master in connection with a search warrant, it's usually where there's a lot of potential privileged documents that the government could potentially be seeing. And you'd want a special master to ensure that the government doesn't have all this access to potentially privileged records. In the Giuliani case, the government was the one who asked for a special master because in that case in 2021, because Giuliani was acting in the capacity of a lawyer, there was a lot of attorney-client privileged documents that could be at issue, whether we

think there's crime fraud exceptions, which there likely are in that case, but there still is the potential when you have an attorney's documents, or particularly in Giuliani, it was all of his emails and phone records that the attorney-client and non-attorney-client information could be inextricably intertwined. But there is no valid privilege claims when it comes to Trump at all. He's not the president anymore. A former president can't make claims for executive privilege currently. That privilege is with the current administration, the Biden administration, who's not asserting any executive privilege. And there is no claim of attorney-client privilege. And these are top

secret national defense documents, top secret and sensitive compartmented information. These are not executive privilege documents or attorney claim. They belong to our government defense agencies. They don't belong to Donald Trump. So in any event, Trump filed this motion before Judge Eileen Cannon asked the judge, hey, can you appoint a special master? But again, the very strange thing about that request is that we're already two to three weeks after the search. So why are you asking for a special master now? Why wouldn't you make that request a day after the search took place or as soon as the search is taking place? And so a lot of people looked at this and said, what is this motion? It's poorly written. It's

poorly researched. There's no authority for it. When I was in that camp, but I also said, what is this motion? It's poorly written. It's poorly researched. There's no authority for it. And I was in that camp, but I also said, it is a Trump-appointed judge, so we need to see what's going to happen there. And so don't underestimate what a Trump-appointed judge can do. And Judge Eileen Cannon has been a member of the Federalist Society since 2005. She was appointed by Trump in 2020. She's very young in terms of being a judicial officer, part of a group of very young judges that Trump appointed with very little trial experience. She was an associate at a law firm. I don't even think she was a partner at a law firm before being appointed to become a federal judge by Trump. But anyway, today she made this order and her

order said that she would intend to have a special master. She gave the government until August 30th to publicly file a response, what their position is going to be with respect to the special master, and then gave the Trump a data reply after that, and then held the hearing on September 1. Trump replied August 31st, the hearing on September 1. Judge Cannon's order did not address at all any of Trump's request to have the government stop reviewing the documents. So the government will either still be reviewing it or likely has already

reviewed all of the records. The order also tells the government to file under seal a more specific list of documents that they've been able to review and to provide their position on a special master. So we'll have the government respond by August 30th. But what we're likely to see here is that the issues are going to be moot. The government will have reviewed all of the records already, and there is going to be no need for a special master where the documents have already been reviewed. They probably were already viewed in the first few days. Now, here's the other very strange thing when I say this order is really, really, really weird. The government has not even been served yet with Donald Trump's new lawsuit,

this motion for judicial oversight and additional relief. To initiate a case, you have to file and then serve. And in the previous filing that Trump made almost before midnight on Friday, Trump's lawyer said they hadn't even served. They said they will promptly serve the Department of Justice. But what they did was when they filed this motion for judicial oversight and additional relief, they simply sent an email to one of the DOJ officials who is not a proper authority to accept service. And no one is disputing that service didn't occur. So what's really strange about this too, though, is that like Eileen Cannon, this Trump judge is like bending over backwards to help Trump. First off, Trump filed like a weird letter, which the judge is accepting to be a valid motion

without following any of the rules if you were going to bring an injunction or make a request. And number two, you have to serve a party. So here, Judge Cannon is ordering a party, in this case, the Department of Justice, to respond when the Department of Justice technically isn't even a party yet in the sense that they haven't been served. They haven't been served with a summons. They haven't been served with a copy of the motion. Clearly, they're aware of it. It's on social media. But we don't serve people via social media and tweets or truths or whatever. There's a process for it. And the judge is going

around what a normal process is. That said, the government is, of course, still going to respond to this motion. They're not going to ignore it. And I think what they're going to respond is, is that you don't have a special master when it comes to top secret, sensitive, compartmented information, number one. Number two, it's moot because they will have already reviewed everything. And number three, any document that they're going to file, they're not going to file it under seal and give Trump the opportunity to review these records. That could be potentially indicative of sources and methods and provide other confidential information that would always be sealed pending a potential indictment. This Rule 6E grand jury types of information.

And I think the government's going to say, well, we can show you some of what we have in camera, but we're not going to file it in a way that Trump can see it. So that's what I expect to happen next. I don't expect this to have really any impact other than it does show, I mean, in my view, a judge not following the rules at all. It's a Trump-appointed judge, a judge trying to go against every principle of being a federal judge with this. And it's frankly really, really embarrassing.

I mean, is this what she wants in her courtroom, that everybody can just send letters and do whatever they want whenever now in her courtroom and just get away with it. That's the message that this judge is sending. And clearly she's treating Trump very differently than she would any other litigant or any judge would treat anybody. I mean, it's really absurd. But again, it's really not going to have any impact. So I don't think we should necessarily blow out of proportion here what the impact of this order is, where she says, it's my intent to hire a special master to independently look at it. And the other part that I find weird is that if she did want to hire this special master,

and that was her intent, by not directing the government to stop reviewing the records in her order, which she didn't, and I'm glad she didn't, it seems to go against the need for the special master. Because if the special master's being appointed to try to avoid, in theory, potential taint in the process, potential attorney-client or executive privileged information being made public, which as I explained earlier in the video, it's really not the case here. But assuming that's what you wanted to stop, then how would this order prevent that from happening by allowing the government to continue to look through it? That's why the order just doesn't even make any legal sense at all. But of course it doesn't. I mean, it's a Trump-appointed judge.

Nothing really makes sense. But we'll see what happens. I want to keep you updated and let you know what the law is here. But not really a big deal here. I think the issues are going to be moot anyway. A special master, again, is not going to have an outcome that Trump wants, right? A special master, if anything, is going to prepare a report. Assume you have a special master, which I don't even think we'll get there, but assume you appointed a special master. The special master report would

say, these documents are top secret, sensitive, compartmented information, and belong to the government, and maybe these items potentially don't. But again, I don't think that's going to happen. And let's even rewind a little bit more. In May of 2022, why didn't Donald Trump at that point when the National Archives said, hey, there is no privilege over these documents, Donald Trump and his lawyers could have contested that. They could have filed a motion. Then they could have filed for a preliminary injunction. Then it said, hey, we have this privilege claim. They didn't do that because these documents are not privileged. And this whole claim is utterly absurd.

Anyway, hope that was a good breakdown for you. This has been my cellist from the Midas Touch Network. Thanks, Ben, for breaking it down and making sense of it all. And thank you for listening to The Mighty. Make sure to subscribe right now to the Midas Touch podcast channel and leave a five-star review. Also, please remember to check out store.midastouch.com for the best Midas Touch gear. We've got new Dark Brandon stickers. We've got Rovember gear. We've got Row, Row, Row Your Vote gear, Convict 45 gear, and so much more. Go get that now.

That's store.midastouch.com. Until next time, shout out to the Midas Mighty.