Former President Donald Trump appeared to praise a federal judge Monday for agreeing to his demand for a special master in the investigation into mishandling of top secret documents.
Minutes after U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon issued the order, Trump mocked the Department of Justice and suggested his followers should fight the “totally corrupt” prosecutors.
“Remember, it takes courage and “guts” to fight a totally corrupt Department of ‘Justice’ and the FBI,” Trump wrote on his social media platform. “They are being pushed to do the wrong things by many sinister and evil outside sources.”
Cannon was appointed by Trump and confirmed in the lame duck session after the 2020 election.
Although Trump did not mention Cannon by name, he suggested that she acted courageously to rein in the probe he derides as a partisan witch hunt.
“Until impartiality, wisdom, fairness, and courage are shown by them, our Country can never come back or recover,” Trump said. “It will be reduced to being a Third World Nation!”
Cannon issued her 24-day order on the Labor Day holiday four days after a hearing in which she suggested she would grant Trump’s request for a special master.
In a sweeping win for Trump, she agreed with Trump that the special master could screen documents that might be covered by both attorney-client privilege and also executive privilege.
The judge ordered investigators to stop reviewing the documents until the independent expert has completed the review, even though Trump’s lawyers did not ask for such an injunction. That won’t stop the probe but it could make it more cumbersome for investigators.
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