Major Legal Win for President Trump as Federal Court Appoints Special Master Oversight of FBI/DOJ Review

In what I believe is a bigger victory for former President Donald Trump than the mainstream media has been willing to report, yesterday, a federal judge granted President Trump's request for an independent special master to review evidence seized by the FBI in the raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.

As we’ve told you, some of the documents seized in the unprecedented raid were noted as being covered by executive privilege or attorney-client privilege. That means those protected private documents should never have been touched, let alone viewed, by Biden’s Deep State foot soldiers. We now know for a fact that the FBI did NOT handle the Trump documents properly.

In her ruling, Judge Aileen Cannon addressed the unusual nature of this investigation and why she ruled that no information gained from protected privileged documents wrongly taken in the FBI raid could be utilized in the DOJ’s investigation, seemingly recognizing the political motives behind all of this when she wrote:

As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own. A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.

For its part, the Biden DOJ tried to fight the appointment of a special master, claiming that it had used its own screening team.

Even Judge Cannon was not fooled by the government’s smokescreen:

To begin, the Government’s argument assumes that the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening for potentially privileged material was sufficient, yet there is evidence from which to call that premise into question here . . . . As reflected in the Privilege Review Team’s Report, the Investigative Team already has been exposed to potentially privileged material. Without delving into specifics, the Privilege Review Team’s Report references at least two instances in which members of the Investigative Team were exposed to material that was then delivered to the Privilege Review Team and, following another review, designated as potentially privileged material [ECF No. 40 p. 6]. Those instances alone, even if entirely inadvertent, yield questions about the adequacy of the filter review process.

Just as we’ve said all along, the judge agreed that the FBI is incapable of holding itself accountable. Judge Cannon’s ruling continues:

[O]n more than one occasion, the Privilege Review Team’s initial screening failed to identify potentially privileged material. The Government’s other explanation—that these instances were the result of adopting an over inclusive view of potentially privileged material out of an abundance of caution—does not satisfy the Court either. Even accepting the Government’s untested premise, the use of a broad standard for potentially privileged material does not explain how qualifying material ended up in the hands of the Investigative Team. Perhaps most concerning, the Filter Review Team’s Report does not indicate that any steps were taken after these instances of exposure to wall off the two tainted members of the Investigation Team [see ECF No. 40].

At one point in her ruling, Judge Aileen Cannon pointed out a key failure of the Biden FBI here: “[P]rosecutors have a responsibility to not only see that justice is done, but to also ensure that justice appears to be done.”

As my dad ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow explained, in this instance it appears clear that justice was not done:

They did not. In fact as we will get to when we break this down for you, documents that were noted as privileged, either attorney-client privilege – probably in that case attorney-client privilege because they didn’t even think executive privilege applied. The judge takes a very different view. But I will tell you this, and this is what I think is so interesting about this is the fact that that information that was privileged was shared with the investigators, which is exactly why you have a taint team to not do that. We’re going to get into the specifics of  this but they actually showed the information to the investigators, or gave them the information in at least two occasions.

Let me start with what the judge said here. The judge said that you had to be mindful of the need to ensure at least, she said, the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances that were presented. So the court authorized the appointment of a special master to review the seized property for personal items and documents and potential privilege, subject to both attorney-client, and/or executive privilege. The government argued that there should be no special matter review of executive privilege material – that was material that the President may have had when he was President – and this judge said no, that issue has not been addressed and finally adjudicated by the Supreme Court yet. There’s enough there to say you can’t do that. She also stopped the government from utilizing this information for the purposes of this investigation. They can continue to investigate but what they can’t do is take the information they gathered from this search and use it in a grand jury proceeding or anything else. So that’s kind of the scope of what’s happening here.

The question is, was this the government’s plan all along, to grab everything it could get its hands on during the raid of the former President’s house, make officials drag their feet under demands to follow proper procedure, while your team combs through every page, hoping to find something incriminating before it gets caught? Or was this just incompetence?

Either way, how are we ever supposed to trust the FBI again? One thing is for sure, anytime President Biden is involved, whether when it was the Obama-Biden FBI, or the current Biden FBI, there’s always something problematic happening. The FBI, and perhaps the entire Department of Justice, needs a major housecleaning. But who will do it when the rot goes all the way to the top?

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast includes in-depth legal analysis of the judge’s ruling on behalf of President Trump as well as your civil rights as an American. Remember, if they’ll pull these political stunts on a former U.S. president, what do you think they’d do to an everyday citizen?

Watch the full broadcast below: