Donald Trump’s special master stunt continues to backfire on him
It’s still not clear why Donald Trump thought that coercing a lowest-level federal judge into improperly appointing a special master would somehow help him. The Court of Appeals was always going to quickly side with the DOJ, and it was merely going to tip everyone off that Trump had been secretly holding something over that one judge’s head. Now Trump’s special master stunt has gone from pointless to outright backfiring on him.
The Court of Appeals has already removed the seized classified documents from the special master’s purview, and the DOJ has reportedly already resumed working with those documents to build its criminal charge against Trump. But while the special master process is now of little importance to the DOJ’s case, the special master is still in place to sort the other seized items. It turns out the special master isn’t exactly on Trump’s side.
The special master is now publicly pushing back against the judge who appointed him, accusing her of having tried to limit his powers. So now there’s even more scrutiny on Trump’s pet judge. Meanwhile the special master is now sending signals that he expects to be done with his special master work at least a month before his allotted time is up – meaning he’s ready to get this nonsense over with.
So what did Donald Trump gain with this stunt? He only managed to stall the DOJ’s progress by about two weeks, which is nothing in the scheme of things. He burned the one judge he appears to have in his pocket. And now he has a special master breathing down his neck about his eventual trial defense. This was a dumb idea by Trump. It was obvious from the start that it had no chance of helping him. And now it looks like it could end up hurting him.
