With Special Counsel Jack Smith winning in court again upon the decision by a three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to end a special master’s review of items seized from Trump taking effect, the former president promptly began raging again.
The review by a court-appointed third party known as a special master was connected to the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s harboring of classified documents after leaving office, which is what led to the raid in August. Only unclassified materials were still subject to the review, but the department argued these documents were critical for establishing context clues for the handling of those identified as classified. The department also challenged Trump’s broad descriptions of what was seized as personal records. Such records are often ordinarily swept up in government searches and seizures. Donald, of course, isn’t convinced. “Under the Presidential Records Act and the very well established Clinton Socks Case, the raid of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, and the taking of documents and many other items, was ILLEGAL. Everything should be returned, at once!” he insisted Friday.
The so-called Clinton socks case is a court dispute over audio recordings of interviews with that ex-president that were once stored in a clothes drawer. Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who ruled in that case, observed a distinction under the piece of federal law known as the Presidential Records Act between government records and those of a “purely private or nonpublic character.” Records originating directly with the federal government — especially those identified by high-level classification markings — couldn’t reasonably be described in such a manner, in contrast to audio recordings made of private conversations outside the bounds of presidential job responsibilities.
Trump is also continuing to rage against supposed interference by social media companies in the last presidential race. He has consistently overstated and misrepresented what these firms actually did. For instance, there is no apparent evidence of any specific directive or warning from the FBI for Facebook about certain reporting on Hunter Biden, a son of the current president. The decisions of social media companies to temporarily limit the spread of that reporting also simply didn’t completely shut it down. It was still highly publicized. Anyone seeing a reference to the story on any app could just close the site and Google it. Yet, Trump now says lives were “destroyed” — whatever on earth that means.
“WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE FBI & “JUSTICE” DEPARTMENT?” he added on early Friday. “THEY SEEM TO BE TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL! THERE IS, RIGHT NOW, A “WEAPONIZATION” OF JUSTICE THE LIKES OF WHICH OUR COUNTRY HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THE TWITTER AND FACEBOOK SCANDAL HAS ALREADY PROVEN TO BE, WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN,THEIR MOST SINISTER ACT IN HISTORY. EVEN THE RINOS & THE WEAK ARE OPENLY ADMITTING THAT THE 2020 ELECTION WAS RIGGED, BUT IN A DARKER WAY THAN EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE. SO MANY LIVES DESTROYED!”
