Judge Cannon issues two new orders, both in favor of Trump

1.  She appointed District Judge Raymond Dearie to be the Special Master.

2.  She denied DOJ's motion for partial stay.

DOJ will now head to the 11th Circuit.

Politico covers the orders here:

While Cannon’s timeline appears to extend Dearie’s review well past the November midterm elections, she did instruct him “to prioritize review of the approximately 100 documents marked as classified (and papers physically attached thereto),” meaning it’s possible prosecutors could regain access to some or all of those materials before they get another look at the other records seized in the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of the Trump’s Florida estate.

Last week, the Justice Department appealed Cannon’s order to appoint a special master and indicated it would seek relief from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals if she did not agree to delay aspects of her ruling by Thursday night. .

The ruling is another setback for federal prosecutors, who have expressed alarm at the extraordinarily sensitive records they found in boxes intermingled with Trump’s personal items in his Mar-a-Lago storage room, as well as some recovered from his office. The Justice Department has warned that Cannon’s Sept. 5 order — which enjoined the department from furthering its criminal review of the documents seized by FBI agents — had also disrupted a parallel risk assessment of those documents by the intelligence community. Though Cannon allowed that review to continue, the Justice Department emphasized that her order had sown confusion within the executive branch.

In one nod to the Justice Department, Cannon ordered Trump to shoulder the full cost of Dearie’s review, as well as that for any staff or associates he hires.

Congrats to Markenzy Lapointe

President Biden just nominated him to be the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida.

He's a really good guy and well liked by just about everyone.

Folks will discuss the timing because of the on-going litigation regarding the Mar-a-Lago search.  Currently all of the pleadings are being signed by Tony Gonzalez, who was the first assistant prosecutor under Ariana Fajardo Orshan, the previous U.S. Attorney who was selected by Trump.  Once Lapointe is confirmed, he will be the local prosecutor in charge of the case.  But, of course, the case is being overseen by the DOJ folks in D.C.

In any event, Lapointe isn't a political guy.  He's right down the middle and is going to do what's right.

Be Kind, It's Science!

By Michael Caruso I wanted to offer a brief supplement to Kate And David's wonderful DBR piece posted below. We've all seen the "Practice Random Acts of Kindness" bumper sticker. Why do we have to be reminded to be kind, and why is kindness in such short supply? An expert has "found that kindness can be a real hard sell. People desire kindness yet often feel inconvenienced by the thought of being kind."

New findings published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, however, demonstrate the power of even small acts of kindness. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.

Not only are small acts of kindness meaningful to the recipients, but they also are beneficial to the givers. Other studies suggest that affiliative behavior may be an important component of coping with stress and indicate that engaging in prosocial behavior might be an effective strategy for reducing the impact of stress on emotional functioning. Sounds like a win-win. 

We should all remember that "a little good goes an unexpectedly long way."

 

"Ladies and gentlemen, the government's case is a grotesque distortion of the truth."

 That's how Marc Mukasay started his opening in the SDNY's Nikola trial.  Nikola's founder Trevor Milton is on trial and accused of defrauding investors. I love following good lawyers in trial and Mukasey lights it up in opening.  Check out this twitter feed of what he did:

 

Mukasey: The truck rolled down the hill? It was a promotional video before Nikola went public. Special effects are not a Federal crime, as far as I know. Let me tell you: Peter Hicks is a man who wants money. He sold the ranch, and wanted more

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) September 13, 2022

"Judges: Be Kind and Remember Your Roots"

 That's the title of a column that my middle daughter, Kate Markus, and I wrote in the Daily Business Review.  Here's the intro:

As a high school student, I deal with seemingly arbitrary scheduling decisions from teachers all the time. Especially in this age of technology, teachers can add assignments randomly throughout the day and night by sending a message to our phones, and they love to add assignments with crazy short deadlines on the day after a big event like Halloween, only to take weeks to grade them.

The same thing happens to lawyers with electronic notices. In the old days, most judges worked with the litigants to find a time that worked with everyone’s schedule for a hearing or a trial. But now, there are instances when lawyers are summarily notified by email that something has been scheduled, sometimes with only a day’s notice. And then the waiting game starts for the order.

As challenging as the scheduling may be for us high school students, the stakes are significantly higher for litigants subject to the dictates of judges who are not always sympathetic to personal family situations including the birth of children.

This happened just recently, when a lawyer asked for an upcoming civil trial to be continued due to the pending birth of his long-awaited daughter, who had been conceived after fertility treatments following a series of difficulties. A Miami-Dade judge refused to continue the case, even though it had not previously been continued and all the lawyers agreed to the continuance. The judge told the lawyer he would be sanctioned if he asked again for a continuance. Only after the story of his ruling broke in the news did the judge relent and grant the continuance.

My own birth story is another example. My dad (and co-author) was scheduled for a complicated and lengthy multi-defendant trial in Savannah, Georgia. The judge set the trial for— you guessed it—the very day my mom was scheduled to deliver me. When my dad asked the judge to push the start date back just a few days so that he could be there for my birth, the judge refused, actually telling my dad he could fly down for “half a day” to attend the birth and then fly back for court the following day. My parents solved this problem by moving up the date of my delivery so that my dad could be there for my birth before leaving town for six weeks.

Paul Huck Jr. on Trump's short list for special master

 Here's the filing.

Government’s Proposed Candidates
The Honorable Barbara S. Jones (ret.) – retired judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, partner in Bracewell LLP, and special master in In re: in the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 28, 2021 and In the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 9, 2018

The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith (ret.) – retired Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, special counsel in Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
 

Plaintiff’s Proposed Candidates
The Honorable Raymond J. Dearie (ret.) – former Chief Judge of the United States
District Court for the Eastern District of New York, served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, formerly the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Paul Huck, Jr.—founder, The Huck Law Firm, former Jones Day partner, former
General Counsel to the Governor, former Deputy Attorney General for the State of Florida

News & Notes

1. DOJ has filed a notice of appeal regarding Judge Cannon's appointment of a special master.  It also asked Cannon to stay parts of her order.

2. A man has been charged with vandalizing the Broward Federal Courthouse.  The pictures don't look as bad as when the rain flooded the place:

 

Steve Bannon set to surrender

 After being pardoned, the State of New York went after Bannon with its own investigation.  He is due to surrender tomorrow.  From the NY Times:

Stephen K. Bannon, the onetime political adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, is expected to surrender on Thursday to New York authorities to face state charges in an indictment that remains sealed, according to a person familiar with the case.

The nature of the charges was unclear early Wednesday. But Mr. Bannon called them “phony” in a statement. “They are coming after all of us,” he said. “I have not yet begun to fight.”

Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, declined to comment.

The charges would not be Mr. Bannon’s first indictment. Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Bannon in January 2021 before he could be brought to trial on federal fraud charges stemming from his work with We Build the Wall Inc., a fund-raising operation set up to help fulfill the former president’s promise to create a physical barrier between the United States and Mexico.