THE DOJ’S LEGAL WORK HAS BEEN EITHER SUBPAR OR OUTRIGHT DISHONEST HERE: Judge Appoints Special Master, Temporarily Bars FBI/DOJ Review Or Use Of Records Seized in Mar-a-Lago Raid.

Related: Judge throws Mar-a-Lago probe into chaos. “The Justice Department blithely assumed that Trump had no executive privilege even though this is an unsettled question in the law. When a salient point of law is unclear, the responsible course for prosecutors is to flag the issue for the court and get a ruling before taking controversial actions. Instead, in seeking the search warrant, DOJ advised Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart that the filtering process that would be implemented in connection with documents seized in the search would screen only for attorney-client privileged documents, not executive privileged documents. The latter category is apt to be considerably more expansive. It does not appear that DOJ alerted Reinhart to the possibility that Trump could have a colorable executive-privilege claim, and there’s no indication that Reinhart raised the question on his own.”