Dearie puts Trump on notice that he will need to put up or shut up on declassification

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

(Starts about five paragraphs down)

Dearie – who served for several years on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – indicated that he would not have much patience for Trump trying to muddy the waters around the classification status of documents marked as classified, particularly if Trump wasn’t willing to lay out why the records should not be treated as classified.

“If the government gives me prima facia evidence that these are classified documents, and you, for whatever reason, decide not to advance any claim of declassification, I’m left with a prima facia case of classified documents, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it,” Dearie told Trump’s lawyers at the hearing.

The Justice Department is asking an appeals court to exclude those 100 or so documents from Dearie’s review and has said that those documents should be presumed classified until the government can assess them.

Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, have argued that the court should not make any assumptions about the classification status of the documents, while vaguely implying the documents may have been declassified. But Trump’s attorneys have stopped well short of asserting in court that Trump himself declassified them, and in a Monday letter to the special master, Trump’s lawyers indicated that they did not want to make such disclosures about declassification at this stage of the review. They telegraphed that could be a part of Trump’s defense if he is indicted.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/politics/takeaways-mar-a-lago-special-master-hearing/index.html

[Tatertot]

1. Document ownership

Dearie needs to take the same position on the other 11000 documents too. Justice Dept claims they are government property as defined by law. What records are the government and what are private are defined in the Presidential Records Act. If trump wants to disagree and claim they are his, let him put forward his evidence (or at least his argument). Up to now he hasn’t been made to put his arguments forward 8n the courts

[Ray Bruns]

2. We would all be grateful if Dearie could get Trump to shut up.