The Loss of Power to corrupt
Excellent article from The Huffington Post this morning;In response to:
Trump May Be About To Learn That Being Ex-President Doesn’t Carry Much Weight In Court
The former president faces a Thursday hearing on his attempt to keep secret his actions and involvement in the Capitol riot he incited to try to remain in power.
By S.V. Date
11/03/2021 06:00am EDT | Updated 27 minutes ago
WASHINGTON ? As Donald Trump tries to keep his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection a secret, he may be about to learn that an ex-president gets far less deference in court than does a sitting one.
Trump, who tried to overthrow American democracy to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election, faces a federal court hearing Thursday on his request to block the National Archives from handing over hundreds of pages of documents from him and his White House staff regarding his actions leading up to and on the day of the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
And after four years of being able to argue that his executive branch was entitled to the benefit of any doubt when it came to carrying out the law, Trump suddenly finds himself on the opposite side of that balancing act.
“Much less deference,” Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said, describing what Trump can expect from judges now compared with when he was in office.
Norm Eisen, who worked with the U.S. House on Trump’s first impeachment and was among a group of lawyers who filed an amicus brief in Trump’s lawsuit, said the issuance of an injunction is based on the likelihood of winning the case. “And because he is no longer president, he has dramatically less likelihood of success on the merits,” he said.
The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot has requested thousands of pages of documents from Trump’s White House now under the custody of the National Archives. Under the Presidential Records Act ? enacted in 1978 after Richard Nixon tried to ensure that White House tapes he had made would be destroyed after he resigned from office ? a former president has the right to ask the sitting president to block release of records on the grounds of executive privilege and, failing that, file a lawsuit.
Thursday’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is to determine whether Trump will be able to block the scheduled Nov. 12 release of the first batch of documents to the committee, following President Joe Biden’s decision not to assert privilege on Trump’s behalf.
But rather than turn to a constitutional legal scholar with expertise in executive-legislative branch disputes, Trump instead hired a lawyer whose Twitter biography reads: “MAGA lawyer fighting for the Constitution and free elections; RINOs beware.”
Jesse Binnall, who represented Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, as he tried to withdraw his plea of guilty to lying to the FBI, previously handled Trump’s lawsuit claiming election fraud in Nevada. That suit failed, and Flynn was pardoned by Trump before he left office.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, this February, Binnall claimed that judges across a number of states had conspired with the news media to suppress information about election fraud and had wrongly dismissed Trump’s challenges.
Binnall’s initial complaint in places reads like a Trump tweet. The select committee “has decided to harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States,” Binnall wrote. “In a political ploy to accommodate his partisan allies, President Biden has refused to assert executive privilege over numerous clearly privileged documents.” ....
Trump May Be About To Learn That Being Ex-President Doesn’t Carry Much Weight In Court
The former president faces a Thursday hearing on his attempt to keep secret his actions and involvement in the Capitol riot he incited to try to remain in power.
By S.V. Date
11/03/2021 06:00am EDT | Updated 27 minutes ago
WASHINGTON ? As Donald Trump tries to keep his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection a secret, he may be about to learn that an ex-president gets far less deference in court than does a sitting one.
Trump, who tried to overthrow American democracy to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election, faces a federal court hearing Thursday on his request to block the National Archives from handing over hundreds of pages of documents from him and his White House staff regarding his actions leading up to and on the day of the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
And after four years of being able to argue that his executive branch was entitled to the benefit of any doubt when it came to carrying out the law, Trump suddenly finds himself on the opposite side of that balancing act.
“Much less deference,” Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said, describing what Trump can expect from judges now compared with when he was in office.
Norm Eisen, who worked with the U.S. House on Trump’s first impeachment and was among a group of lawyers who filed an amicus brief in Trump’s lawsuit, said the issuance of an injunction is based on the likelihood of winning the case. “And because he is no longer president, he has dramatically less likelihood of success on the merits,” he said.
The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot has requested thousands of pages of documents from Trump’s White House now under the custody of the National Archives. Under the Presidential Records Act ? enacted in 1978 after Richard Nixon tried to ensure that White House tapes he had made would be destroyed after he resigned from office ? a former president has the right to ask the sitting president to block release of records on the grounds of executive privilege and, failing that, file a lawsuit.
Thursday’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is to determine whether Trump will be able to block the scheduled Nov. 12 release of the first batch of documents to the committee, following President Joe Biden’s decision not to assert privilege on Trump’s behalf.
But rather than turn to a constitutional legal scholar with expertise in executive-legislative branch disputes, Trump instead hired a lawyer whose Twitter biography reads: “MAGA lawyer fighting for the Constitution and free elections; RINOs beware.”
Jesse Binnall, who represented Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, as he tried to withdraw his plea of guilty to lying to the FBI, previously handled Trump’s lawsuit claiming election fraud in Nevada. That suit failed, and Flynn was pardoned by Trump before he left office.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, this February, Binnall claimed that judges across a number of states had conspired with the news media to suppress information about election fraud and had wrongly dismissed Trump’s challenges.
Binnall’s initial complaint in places reads like a Trump tweet. The select committee “has decided to harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States,” Binnall wrote. “In a political ploy to accommodate his partisan allies, President Biden has refused to assert executive privilege over numerous clearly privileged documents.” ....
(continued in my first comment box below)