The Mar-a-Lago espionage scandal is a three-alarm national security crisis. We should act like it.

[mia]

Republicans are treating the investigation of defeated former president Donald Trump’s purloining of classified government documents as another opportunity to play victim and attack law enforcement. U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a last-minute Trump nominee jammed through during the 2020 lame-duck session, seems to be contemplating a special master to review the documents one by one to see whether there is some basis for blocking them from prosecutors, even as the intelligence community feverishly conducts a national security review. (Trump is bizarrely asking the court to block the Justice Department from seeing what intelligence reviewers already are examining. One longs for the “unitary executive theory” to be applied consistently.)

...Let’s imagine that Judge Cannon is willing, contrary to previous rulings in Trump-related cases, to find that Trump enjoys some residual executive privilege consideration. Nevertheless, as U.S. v. Nixon and its progeny have held, any such privilege claim pales in comparison to the interest in criminal prosecution.

The unanimous Supreme Court found, “Without access to specific facts, a criminal prosecution may be totally frustrated. The President’s broad interest in confidentiality of communications will not be vitiated by disclosure of a limited number of conversations preliminarily shown to have some bearing on the pending criminal cases.” It therefore held that “when the ground for asserting privilege as to subpoenaed materials sought for use in a criminal trial is based only on the generalized interest in confidentiality, it cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice.”

And when that prosecution involves our most closely guarded secrets, any assertion of privilege is trivial, dangerous and improper. Moreover, the only interest Trump has here (because he is not the guarantor of national security) is the vague desire to conceal confidential communications that could potentially be used in his prosecution under the Espionage Act....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/04/trump-national-security-crisis/

[gab13by13]

1. Thank you for this post.

Remember the movie with Roddy Rowdy Piper, when he had a pair of shades that revealed who aliens were That's how I feel about how serious of a situation we are in. The aliens are all over the place, please look, please understand.

[murielm99]

2. I remember that movie,

but not the title!

[mia]

3. Thank you for your reference to "They Live". Here's a recap of the movie.