The Trump legal team's response to the Justice Department over Mr. Trump's request that the court appoint a special master to review the documents that the government recovered from Mar-A-Lago, filed today in federal court in Florida, is not up to the usual low standard of the team's legal work. The hilarity begins on page 1, when Mr. Trump's lawyers call it "extraordinary" that the Justice Department believes that the Justice Department should be "entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating its unjustified pursuit of criminalizing a former President's possession of personal and Presidential records in a secure setting."
On the next page the lawyers do acknowledge that something called the Presidential Records Act exists, one sentence before they step off of the bridge into the moat of alligators: "Thus, there is no question and, indeed there is broad agreement, that the matters before this Court center around the possession, by a President, of his own Presidential records." Not content to swim with the alligators, the lawyers then offer themselves as nutriment for the carnivorous: "Indeed, the warrant intentionally blurs important distinctions in referring to the ability of FBI agents to seize 'Presidential Records' (the PRA never concerns itself with traditional classification labels) while wrongfully suggesting the applicability of the Espionage Act and referring to expectations of recovering classified or highly classified documents."
Where do the alligators come in? Let's take their missteps one at a time.
First, it is traditional, and in fact statutory, for the Justice Department to investigate possible federal crimes.
Second, while Mar-A-Lago may be a "secure setting" in the sense that the doors lock and the security cameras work, it is not a secure setting in the way that the SCIF in Congress is a secure setting. ("SCIF" stands for "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility." There's one in the White House and another in Congress. They tend not to be found at country clubs.) And Mar-A-Lago has become known for lapses in security: in March 2019, a Chinese "business consultant" managed to enter Mar-A-Lago with a bagful of electronics and get past five Secret Service agents and into the reception area, all while Mr. Trump was still the president and had a robust cadre of Secret Service agents on the property.
Third, the lawyers inexpertly said that the case is about the possession, by an [ex-]President, "of his own Presidential records." Are they "his own Presidential records"? In one syntactical sense, they are; that is, they are records about Mr. Trump's four years as president. In the legal sense, however, they are not "his own Presidential records," for the Presidential Records Act, 44 USC §2201 ff, states that "The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records." The Presidential Records Act also states that when a president leaves office, "the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President." The law is quite clear that the Presidential records of Mr. Trump's term don't belong to him; they belong to the nation, and the Archivist is entitled to hold and preserve those records.
Fourth, they erred badly in suggesting that the affidavit supporting the search warrant improperly referred to the possibility that the FBI might recover classified documents from Mr. Trump's office at Mar-A-Lago - because the FBI did recover classified documents.
Why do Mr. Trump's lawyers sign their names to such shoddy legal work? One possibility is that they know their client has no real defense, and they're serving not as his lawyers so much as his public relations agents. Another possibility is that they themselves don't know how bad their arguments are, but they're the best of the lawyers that are still willing to tie their reputations to Donald Trump. (Rope, meet millstone.)
The third possibility is that they themselves are among the alligators, hoping to dine well on Mr. Trump's legal troubles and then to get out before the final crash, rather like the guests at the legendary ogre's feast who ate and drank well, realizing only too late that the ogre would dine on the last remaining guests.