This “special master” ruling is horse crap but it doesn’t really help Donald Trump
When Donald Trump waited two weeks to file in court for a special master, a few things were clear. If he and his legal team were really banking on using this as a stall tactic, and if they had any idea of how anything worked, they would have filed for it on day one. Instead they sat back and let the Feds finish sorting the seized evidence before even asking for a special master – meaning it wouldn’t really be a win even if they got a win.
Today, the judge in the case – a last minute Trump appointee before he left office – ruled in favor of a special master. This has set off an overwhelming round of defeatist hysteria about how Trump has “gotten away with it all” and how he’ll “run out the clock” and how “all hope is lost.” But that is, to put it mildly, not how anything works, and the pundits who shout these simplistic phrases to try to get rage-retweets are not serious people.
First, this ruling is legal gibberish on its face. There is nothing in this judge’s ruling that is in any way compatible with the law – meaning it’s precisely the kind of ruling that quickly and automatically gets overturned by the appeals court. Second, even if this judge’s ruling did contain any legally valid arguments, appointing a special master to oversee the sorting of evidence after it’s already been sorted is laugh out loud nonsense. Again, it’s precisely why this ruling won’t last five minutes on appeal.
In fact, the laugh out loud nature of the ruling gives away that while this judge is very much afraid of Donald Trump (something that must be looked into), she’s not actually trying to help him with this ruling. If she wanted to help him, she would have handed him a much narrower victory, the kind that might have had a chance of standing up under appeal. Instead, the judge issued the kind of absurdist ruling that she knows will immediately die on appeal. She’s not trying to help Trump; she’s trying to make him think she helped Trump, so he’ll end up blaming the appeals court instead of her.
This simply is not a win for Donald Trump. The only way the doomsday pundits can even try to spin this as a win for Trump is to portray it as having happened in a vacuum, where the appeals court doesn’t exist, the DOJ doesn’t appeal things, and laugh out loud lower court rulings just somehow magically remain in effect without anything happening in response. But that kind of thing only exists in pundit fantasyland, not in the real world.
Again, we’ll need to look deeply into why this judge has decided to put her reputation and career at risk by issuing a gibberish ruling just to appease Trump, knowing that it’ll be immediately quashed. Does Trump have dirt on her, or is she just that afraid of the mean things Trump might have said about her on social media? Either way, she’s unfit and must be impeached. But the only real loser today is her, because she just set fire to her own career, in a way that doesn’t actually benefit Trump.
