Conway Blasts Trump Appointee’s Ruling: ‘You Have to Wonder Whether This Judge Belongs on a Federal Bench’
Attorney George Conway reacted incredulously to Judge Aileen Cannon’s rejection of a Department of Justice request to allow investigators to resume reviewing documents seized at Donald Trump’s home last month.
FBI agents executed a search warrant at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where they found thousands of government documents, including classified material.
Trump has claimed he declassified all the documents and stated some of them are privileged materials.
On Thursday, Cannon rebuffed the request because she said she is not convinced the documents are classified and not privileged. Her ruling has been roundly ridiculed on legal Twitter.
Trump’s attorneys requested the appointment of a special master to review the documents instead of federal prosecutors – a request Cannon, whom Trump appointed in 2020, granted earlier this month. In her ruling today, she appointed Raymond Dearie as a special master. The DOJ is expected to appeal to the 11th Circuit.
Conway appeared on CNN Thursday evening to offer his reaction.
“I don’t know that it’s going to be a huge setback in the long-term, but it’s going to delay them to some extent,” he stated about the investigators in the case. “I mean, this ruling is absolutely a disgrace. And I don’t think it’s going to take very much to overturn it. I mean, Bill Barr last week told the New York Times that the original motion by Donald Trump’s lawyers was a ‘crock of shit.'”
Conway stated Cannon’s ruling on Thursday is even worse.
“This opinion is worse than that because this opinion focuses on a motion–decides emotion that is focused on just the documents that were marked classified,” he continued. “And the judge claims in this opinion without any basis, that there are factual and legal disputes about those documents. Well, there are no factual disputes about whether a document bears classified markings. That’s ridiculous.”
He went on to say “there is no dispute” that the government documents found at Mar-a-Lago belong to the U.S. government.
Trump has claimed publicly that he declassified all the materials found at his residence. However, his attorneys have not argued accordingly in a court of law, which calls into question Trump’s claim.
Conway noted this fact and questioned whether Cannon, 41, is qualified to be a federal judge:
And even Trump’s lawyers did not actually make the specific claim that these documents were somehow magically declassified by brainwaves of Donald Trump. And it doesn’t even matter whether these documents were declassified because the charges at issue here don’t deal with classification. They deal with national security interests. This opinion is absolutely atrocious. And I have to say – and I’ve never said this publicly about a federal judge in my life – you have to wonder whether this judge belongs on a federal bench.
Watch above via CNN.
