As I wait for the black-robed person with the lifetime judicial appointment to share her next pronouncement from on high, author and lawyer Seth Abramson expresses himself on the Florida fiasco. I especially found interesting his description of how a case like this works in the real world:

We have our special master! In a… uh… theft case… not involving attorney-client privilege or executive privilege or anything else special masters deal with… {sigh} This is all so goddamned stupid.

I earnestly admire those lawyers who are spending hours and hours analyzing the legal maneuvers in the Mar-a-Lago case. But I decided I couldn’t do it—because it’s all so stupid and farcical and pretextual and an insult to the rule of law and how {waves hands} all of this works.

I have worked *extremely* complicated criminal cases, from first-degree murders to armed robberies to felonious sexual assaults to financial crimes cases and other types of cases in which documents are at the center of everything. And let me tell you what the Mar-a-Lago case is:

It’s the equivalent of a man being caught with a gun over the dead body of his victim—smoke still rising from the gun, residue all over the hand of the shooter—with a *signed confession in his handwriting* pinned to his chest like he’s a kindergartener on his first day of school.

There is—I can’t emphasize this enough—nothing complicated about this case besides the political consequences and implications of it, which every lawyer in America took an oath not to consider when they became a lawyer (and that includes judges). So the whole thing is sickening.

The lawyers who are currently analyzing this case to death are doing so in good faith and are trying to be good people and lawyers. But they are also normalizing the idea that there are any actual complications to write about here. There are not. They are all invented and false.

There are no attorney-client privilege issues here. There are no executive privilege issues here. The defendant is dead to rights and has no plausible defense. Under normal circumstances plea negotiations would’ve begun immediately, and prison time would be a given to both sides.

I have committed myself to being honest with readers about the law, and also honest about my desire that our justice system be better than it is. How can I pretend to the readers of this feed that the Mar-a-Lago case is interesting when *legally* it is just effing *not*? At all?

And don’t tell me about this being the first case of its kind involving a President of the United States. Had Trump gone to Fifth Avenue as he once promised and gunned down a bunch of innocent civilians, would that make the resultant homicide cases *legally* interesting? Hell no.

Mar-a-Lago case talk is a flim-flam we’re sucked into because we feel like there’s no other choice. We “have” to discuss the minute details of the case for political reasons—and because T____’s the sort of criminal who’s never been held accountable and never takes responsibility.

But the other reason it seems we have to talk about it is that the federal judiciary in Florida apparently corrupt, and will openly treat a very rich and very powerful and very famous white male politician in a way that it wouldn’t treat anyone else. And it’ll do so unabashedly.

So every single reason to cover the intricacies of the Mar-a-Lago case is depressing. And I feel the world is depressing enough already. It should be sufficient for readers to simply know that T____ is dead to rights and would be imprisoned already if he were not D____ T____.

Yes, as a former federal criminal investigator, I can point out all the critical investigative steps the Department of Justice deliberately *didn’t* take—all of them dereliction of duty—for purely political reasons, which makes their repeated protestations that they’re above politics morally toxic but they could easily reply—or their defenders could do so on their behalf—that they’re just reacting to a corrupt judiciary that won’t let the wheels of justice turn unimpeded when the rich, powerful, and famous in politics are involved….

So when I write on the Mar-a-Lago case, I’ll write about a case in which the defendant has no defense and should already be in prison (remember, DOJ/NARA—extraordinarily—gave T____ 18 months to remedy his crime, and he refused *and committed more*) and the legal issues are banal….

It is true that in any case in which documents are seized, some documents not related to the investigation may be accidentally taken. These are returned *as a matter of course* (e.g., T____’s passports). If the defendant thinks some items were not returned, he has his attorney ask government agents for them back. If the government agents refuse, the defendant has his attorney go to the judge and a hearing is held and an order (if appropriate) issued. If the parties *dispute* whether something was properly taken, the judge may personally review the *handful* of documents answering to that description (and indeed it would only be a handful of documents). There would be no special master, no delay of the criminal investigation. None of the abject, embarrassing BS we are seeing in the Mar-a-Lago case.

This judge impeded a federal criminal investigation and will appoint a special master without D____ T____ having even identified any documents he thinks were wrongly taken or making any attempt to negotiate their return (or have the judge herself review them). It is all a sham.

Special masters are for cases that look nothing like this one—for instance when the office of a defendant’s attorney is searched. T____ has yet to even make the argument—because he could never make it—that he had a right to retain classified documents in his home post-presidency.

So yes, I do believe that every legal analysis of this case should begin with a disclaimer explaining that nothing about this case has been handled in the manner it would be handled were the defendant anyone but D____ T____—and that the rule of law has been bent at *every* turn.