Everyone involved in this pro-Trump brief knows better -- including Ken Paxton

[Nevilledog]

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Steve Vladeck
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New via @MSNBCDaily: Me on Texas's verkakte brief in the Mar-a-Lago case — which was not just inaccurate, irrelevant, and hypocritical, but which ominously shows how states are increasingly claiming an interest in the *political* implications of lawsuits:

msnbc.com
Opinion | Everyone involved in this pro-Trump brief knows better — including Ken Paxton
As a rant masquerading as a legal filing, it was unbecoming of any lawyer. As a brief signed by the attorneys general of nearly a dozen U.S. states, it was indefensible.
6:33 PM · Sep 27, 2022

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/texas-ag-defends-trump-embarrassing-mar-lago-brief-n1299096

There’s a classic story often used to define the Yiddish word “chutzpah”: A boy is accused of murdering his parents, only to turn around and beg for mercy because he’s (now) an orphan. But future generations may instead use a (real) story of Texas, and a friend of the court brief produced by the state's Attorney General Ken Paxton last week.

Ostensibly filed in support of former President Donald Trump’s idiosyncratic challenge to the Aug. 8 search of his Mar-a-Lago property, the brief, which was joined by 10 other red states (Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Louisiana, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia), had nothing at all to say about the legal issues raised in Trump’s case. Instead, over 10 pages of what might be called “argument,” the brief offered a laundry list of political complaints about the Biden administration — all of which, Texas argued, should lead courts to doubt federal government claims. As a rant masquerading as a legal filing, it was unbecoming of any lawyer. As a brief signed by the attorneys general of nearly a dozen U.S. states, it was indefensible.

The actual issue before the 11th Circuit last week was whether the federal government was entitled to a partial stay of an injunction entered by Judge Aileen Cannon — which had blocked the Justice Department’s access to documents seized during the Aug. 8 search as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. The government responded that it only needed access to roughly 100 documents with classified markings on them, and in a thorough (and analytically devastating) 29-page opinion, the three court of appeals judges (two of whom were appointed by Trump) unanimously sided with the federal government.

Against that backdrop, the Texas brief is almost hard to even describe. The brief doesn’t acknowledge the underlying dispute; it offers no argument in defense of the merits of Judge Cannon’s decision (or of Trump’s conduct); indeed, the word “classified” doesn’t appear once in the entire filing. In the “interest of amici curiae” section, which is where the brief is supposed to explain the connection between the friends of the court and the underlying dispute, Texas went full Fox News and framed the purpose of the brief as highlighting “how the Administration’s conduct in connection with this case is of a piece with the gamesmanship and other questionable conduct that have become the hallmarks of its litigating, policy-making, and public-relations efforts. At a minimum, this Court should view the Administration’s assertions of good-faith, neutrality, and objectivity through jaundiced eyes.”

*snip*

[Qutzupalotl]

1. Good thing they're not being political.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. Wuhan? WTF? link to the pdf ...

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000183-5bb6-da48-a3e3-fbb798e20000