🤡 Show

This is from Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed of Noodles. It offers even more legal detail than Quasi’s.


"What's she’s [the judge] saying is, 'What are you doing in front of me?'" [That's what I wrote her message came down to.] Mark Schnapp, a criminal defense lawyer in Florida who spent seven years working for the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida, told CNN.


…the complaint leaned heavily into political accusations, while being light on the sort of legal discussion that would explain to a court why it should intervene and what authority it had to do so.


When 45th’slawyers did cite the court rules they said gave the judge the authority to grant the request, they cited the rules of civil procedure, without any explanation for why those rules should be applied in a context concerning a criminal search warrant.

That is a good point…I think. They’re asking for a special master to determine what if anything is attorney-client privilege. That request could be considered civil in nature, I’m not sure. But the request (they didn't make even that clear, apparently) pertains to a criminal case. So why wouldn't they have gone back before Judge Reinhart? I don't know.). I don't mean this to be a completely facetious point: Experienced prosecutors will tell you that the hardest thing is to litigate against a pro se defendant. 45th's lawyers are such clowns that it is as if 45th is representing himself.

45th also did not file with the complaint the kind of separate request -- such as a motion for a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction -- that would have sped up the timeline for the judge to consider what Trump was asking for.

Ineffective assistance of counsel.

Nor did 45th's legal team file any declarations -- i.e. statements from the lawyers who were said to have interacted with the Justice Department in the lead-up and after the search -- to back up the complaint's factual assertions.

 

Ineffective assistance of counsel. This is why it is so hard to litigate against incompetent lawyers, barred or pro se. Both prosecutor and judge have to go overboard in looking out for the defendant's rights. These were Judge Cannon's concerns in granting them extra time to get their act together. A criminal conviction can get tossed on appeal for ineffective assistance of counsel. But this was filed as a civil motion. Civil cases never, or almost never, get reversed for ineffective assistance of counsel. Filing this as a civil motion may have been ineffective. YOU SEE WHY THESE CASES ARE SUCH PAINS IN THE ASS?!

Instead, the complaint retread allegations about the FBI's investigation into Russia's 2016 election interference, while sensationally suggesting that the DOJ's actions were motivated by a desire to hinder a Trump 2024 presidential run.

Schnapp said Trump's filing Monday read more like a political message than a legal document.

"They really didn't ask for anything. That's the craziness," Schnapp said. "They didn't ask for anything to be done in the immediate future to slow it down, even though that's what they claimed to be doing"

 

"They didn't ask for anything": Ooh, now I'm getting concerned. They are REALLY inept. Judge Cannon did ABSOLUTELY the right thing to give them more time.

Trump's move to file a separate case that was assigned to Judge Cannon, rather than file the request with [Judge Reinhart] who signed off on the warrant, also prompted confusion [Yes, wrote that above.] among outside legal experts. 

 

It appears that Trump's lawyers even ran into procedural issues with the filing of the lawsuit and with their attempts to enter appearances in the case. 

My fellow legal eagles, they didn't even know they had to use CM/ECF to file their NOA's.🤮Oh God.

 
The clerk posted one notice on the docket indicating that the complaint had been "filed conventionally" when it "should have been filed electronically," according to the court's local rules.

 
45th's attorneys who were seeking special admission to enter appearances in the case because they were not [licensed to practice] in Florida also failed to follow the local rules in doing so. They were given another chance to enter their appearances correctly.

Again, Judge Cannon doing the right thing by bending over backwards to make this all come out okay. That was more illuminating than NYT's article.