Two Trump-Appointed Judges Ruled Mar-a-Lago Probe Can Continue in Blistering Rebuke of Fellow Trump Appointee’s Order

Two of the three appeals court judges who overruled Judge Aileen Cannon‘s decision halting the Mar-a-Lago investigation were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

Cannon — also a Trump appointee — had previously ruled that not only should a special master must be appointed to review the seized documents, she enjoined the Justice Department from using the documents in its investigation of Trump for crimes involving the Espionage Act in the interim.

Cannon issued a ruling last week appointing Judge Raymond Dearie — one of Team Trump’s proposed candidates — as Special Master, and denying DoJ’s motion to continue their review of the 100 classified documents seized.

The Justice Department filed an appeal Friday to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that tore into the reasoning behind Cannon’s order.

On Wednesday, a three-judge panel — Obama appointee Judge Robin Rosenbaum, Trump appointee Judge Britt Grant, and Trump appointee Andrew Brasher — ruled in the Justice Department’s favor, and rebuked Cannon’s decision in a scorching opinion.

Right off the bat, the panel, writing with one voice, dismissed Cannon’s claim to jurisdiction as an “abuse,”  but kept going anyway “for the sake of completeness”:

[Judge Cannon] concluded that Plaintiff did not show that the United States acted in callous disregard of his constitutional rights. Doc. No. 64 at 9. No party contests the district court’s finding in this regard. The absence of this “indispensab[le]” factor in the Richey analysis is reason enough to conclude that the district court abused its discretion in exercising equitable jurisdiction here. Chapman, 559 F.2d at 406. But for the sake of completeness, we consider the remaining factors.

The panel then threw unsubtle shade on Cannon’s reasoning by contrasting it with their own:

The district court concluded that Plaintiff had an interest in some of the seized material because it included “medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information.” Doc. No. 64 at 9. But none of those concerns apply to the roughly one-hundred classified documents at issue here. And the district court made no mention in its analysis of this factor as to why or how Plaintiff might have an individual interest in or need for the classified documents.

For our part, we cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings.

And the panel cited a parade of precedents to dispute Cannon’s assertion of potential injury to Trump from “the threat of future prosecution and the serious, often indelible stigma associated therewith”:

No doubt the threat of prosecution can weigh heavily on the mind of someone under investigation. But without diminishing the seriousness of that burden, “if the mere threat of prosecution were allowed to constitute irreparable harm . . . every potential defendant could point to the same harm and invoke the equitable powers of the district court.”

They conclude that the DoJ “is substantially likely to succeed in showing that the district court abused its discretion in exercising jurisdiction over Plaintiff’s motion as it concerns the classified documents.”

“For the reasons we have explained, we GRANT the stay pending appeal. The district court order is STAYED to the extent it enjoins the government’s use of the classified documents and requires the government to submit the classified documents to the special master for review,” the judges wrote.

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