If there was crystal clear, 4K quality video footage of Trump stabbing someone to death and he got arrested, MAGA cult would say it was a hit job and that the video was a deepfake created by the Deep State. That contingent is a lost cause.
SDFL has a district court duty schedule as well. For the West Palm courthouse in August it would have been Robin Rosenberg (an Obama nominee). Also would have been fine with trying to find a way to ask the Chief Judge (currently Altonaga) to assign it to a district judge. There’s a lot of space in between the duty magistrate and picking whatever judge they wanted to go to.
A bit lost in all this is the fact that Trump has a copy of the warrant and a complete inventory of everything the feds took. Decide for yourselves why he’s keeping those to himself.
Judge Altonaga is in Miami. They set up duty judges to avoid Judge shopping. It wasn’t Judge Middlebrooks’ week.
He doesn’t have the application. And his lawyer gave an interview with WAPO confirming that the search was about the archive records.
Because the same people crying foul over the MJ wouldn't be crying foul over the two active AIII judges in West Palm (both of whom were appointed by Democratic Presidents)?
Fun note: one of the people in that picture begged Hunter Biden for a letter of recommendation for their kid to get into Georgetown.
Article has links to the conspiratorial BS : The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t – Obama’s Paper Records Will Be Digitized With ZERO Archivists on Site - Conservative News & Right Wing News | Gun Laws & Rights News Site and Barry didn't want anyone looking at his notes before he left either : Obama admin spent $36M on lawsuits to keep info secret guy likes to hide his dirty laundry
Not the application, no, but the signed warrant would describe the property to be searched and items to be seized, which would give a lot of insight into what the investigation concerns. Team Trump's PR blitz notwithstanding.
Middlebrooks, Rosenberg, and Marra rotate months as the duty district judge in West Palm (schedule is here: https://www.flsd.uscourts.gov/sites/flsd/files/adminorders/2021-104.pdf) Is someone going to whine about who the duty judge was? Probably (and in this instance it presumably would have been Rosenberg). But I still think it’s a much better look under these circumstances to say you got signoff from a true Article III judge, notwithstanding how common magistrate approval may be.
It would hold no legal significance, and the same people complaining about this judge would be attacking Robin Rosenberg (since you said she was on duty). Frankly, Reinhart has more criminal law experience than Rosenberg. We're all equal under the eyes of the law, right? If a MJ's signature is good enough to search your house, why not Trump's?
That's what I've been saying. Trump has a copy of the warrant. If he's squeaky clean then show the full copy of the warrant. He doesn't have to though because the GOP will eat this up regardless of any wrongdoing.
5th ave on display for everyone to see. Semantics, parsing, excuses and your lying eyes. SMDH.lol… We don’t know shat, but will and then we can judge (or magistrate) for ourselves guilt, innocence or divine savior serving Koolaid.
There's no mechanism in Rule 41 for requesting review by a district court judge instead of a magistrate. There's also no guidance in the justice manual (or anywhere else for that matter) that even remotely suggests the DOJ should consider bypassing the magistrate under any circumstances. Given that, it's fairly obvious if the DOJ did attempt such a maneuver, the narrative would be that they knew they had a baseless warrant app from the jump and needed a rubber stamp from an Obama appointee. In the abstract, I tend to agree that it would make sense to have a system for referring highly significant warrants to a DCJ. But the processes and procedures for that would need to be spelled out in the rules with pre-existing guidance on the DOJ's part for when to make the request. Otherwise, doing it on an ad hoc basis just looks like judge shopping.
It doesn’t require approval from main Justice to search my house either (well, I guess technically it probably does if the “me” here is the true first-person “me” in light of the USAM provisions relating to execution of a search warrant on a practicing attorney engaged in the representation of clients, but if the me/you here was Joe Q. Public rather than a lawyer it wouldn’t), yet I think we all agree that this either did or should have. It would have been a good idea here for the same reason. If you’re doing something particularly delicate or unprecedented, it’s not a bad idea to take every procedural caution you can to demonstrate how careful and legitimate it was.