Apparently ... DoJ has an unwritten rule that it does not indict within 60 days of a federal election. We are currently 64 days away from that date.
If DoJ had been planning to indict Trump in the next 4 days, Judge Cannon has effectively squashed that with her ruling. IMO, DOJ was never going to indict before the midterms. That would have been a fast timeline for something this complex, and the politicization of an indictment is another factor that would push them into mid-November at the earliest anyway. The much bigger risk is if the claim of executive privilege stands. Kavanaugh has already questioned it.
Cannon wrote - “Even if any assertion of executive privilege by plaintiff ultimately fails in this context, that possibility, even if likely, does not negate a former president’s ability to raise the privilege as an initial matter,”
The ruling also effectively barred federal prosecutors from using key pieces of evidence as they continue to investigate whether Mr. Trump illegally retained national defense documents at his estate.
www.nytimes.com
Trump has no executive privilege to exert. He’s not the Executive. Biden is, and Biden has already waived executive privilege with respect to these documents. This judge is raising this issue as if Trump has some basis to claim a privilege that isn’t his. That’s going to make this a mess.
The “60 day rule”. Basic point: no-one is sure how it should apply in this case. So, if DoJ was planning to plow ahead with the investigation during the 2-month window, it’s now blocked by whatever bullshit delaying tactics arise from the Special Master farce.
None of these wonderful boons were granted in response to Team Trump’s dumpster fire of legal filings. The judge helpfully sifted through that mountain of crap, told them what tests ought to be applied and how they would be met, and then went ahead and applied them. She behaved exactly like a sympathetic judge would treat a pro se litigant who submitted incoherent briefs by crayon, so the poor dear would have some chance at a fair trial before being utterly annihilated on the merits.
But this was not a nobody pro se litigant, it was a former President who had means to secure his own counsel. And this was not any judge either, it was a judge basically appointed by the defendant himself, and a member of the Federalist Society since 2005. This likely gets kicked to the 11th circuit which is a similar jurisprudential clown show. And then to SCOTUS where it’s easy to imagine Alito writing for a 6-3 majority saying “Trump can do all of this, it’s fine, he’s still kind of President if you really squint and think about it.” This situation is exactly what it looks like.