Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters
Hidden between the lines of the Justice Department’s filing Thursday asking Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon to temporarily stay part of her own Trump special master order is the implication that Cannon is accomplishing little besides hurting an investigation that seeks to protect our national security.
The DOJ’s filing not only gives notice that it plans to appeal her decision but also asks her to enjoin herself by temporarily lifting her ban on the DOJ reviewing and working with the set of just over 100 classified documents that are being kept separately from the rest of the documents seized by the FBI at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Cannon had stopped the DOJ from reviewing all of the documents but allowed an intelligence assessment of the documents to continue. Although the DOJ notes that it continues to disagree with Cannon barring access to all of the documents pending a special master’s review, its stay request applies only to a review of the classified documents. In laying out the reasons for this narrow ask, the DOJ exposes Cannon’s allowing only an intelligence assessment of the documents to proceed as unworkable and dangerous.