Federal Judge Gives Trump ANOTHER Dick-Kickin' In Re: January 6 Documents
Always a nice thing to read.
Here's your latest update on the saga of whether Donald Trump will be required to hand documents over to the House January 6 Select Committee, or whether he can assert that he is the real and true king for life, and America is not his real dad, and he doesn't have to do what anybody else says, and he hates this whole school, and he does too have a girlfriend, and she goes to a different school, and ...
Anyway, none of these hearings has been going well for the former loser president, and last night's decision from Judge Tanya Chutkan didn't go well for him either:
"Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President," Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in her ruling.
Etch it in stone and inject it into our veins! But preferably not at the same time, as that seems dangerous.
Here's more of the full paragraph that comes from:
Plaintiff does not acknowledge the deference owed to the incumbent President's judgment. His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power "exists in perpetuity." But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President. He retains the right to assert that his records are privileged, but the incumbent President "is not constitutionally obliged to honor" that assertion.
That should give you an idea of what Judge Chutkan is feeling right now.
And that is where things stand for Trump, unless an appeals court — or even SCOTUS — saves him at the last minute, because as Politico reports, the National Archives is planning to start handing it the fuck over on Friday. (Trump has of course appealed.)
President Joe Biden is the president, and he has already decided to waive executive privilege for the documents the committee seeks related to the former president. And just as Judge Chutkan had done during arguments last week, she politely dick-kicked Donald Trump's sad idiot legal arguments that somehow a case called Nixon v. General Services Administration, which Richard Nixon lost, magically gave Trump, and not the current president, the authority to make these decisions. In arguments, she had asked Trump's sad idiot lawyer if there was "any language in Nixon v. GSA that says" what Trump's team thought it says, quipping at one point that "I'm not sure if that case is as helpful to you as you think it is."
So too in this ruling:
Chutkan said the Nixon precedent fails to help Trump's case. In that instance, the current president — the only sitting "executive" — had not weighed in on Nixon's effort to shield his records. In this case, Biden had already agreed to provide the documents to the Jan. 6 committee, waiving confidentiality concerns as a result of the "unprecedented" nature of the attack on Congress.
"At bottom, this is a dispute between a former and incumbent President. And the Supreme Court has already made clear that in such circumstances, the incumbent's view is accorded greater weight," Chutkan wrote, citing the Nixon-era ruling.
Trump's lawyers, as Politico reports, had also asked Chutkan to look at every document the committee wants to see individually, to see if Congress should see it. She told them to fuck off.
"The court … is not best situated to determine executive branch interests, and declines to intrude upon the executive function in this manner," Chutkan wrote. "It must presume that the incumbent is best suited to make those decisions on behalf of the executive branch."
"The court will not second-guess [Biden's] decision by undertaking a document-by-document review that would require it to engage in a function reserved squarely for the Executive," she added.
Get it? Joe Biden is the president. Not Donald Trump. Joe Biden is Donald Trump's real dad, and will decide which of his documents are which.
Let's see if this ruling gets stayed by the appeals court, but Trump is running out of people to save him from that mean January 6 committee.
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I assume the fifth appeals circuit ruling will be one sentence “nuhuh Trump is too god King. Overruled”
TFG still wins if he gets the ruling stayed, then appealed, then stayed, then appealed until the House flips in 2022 and the GOP shitcans the 1/6 committee.