The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday evening reversed U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s refusal to grant the Justice Department a stay in the case of the Mar-a-Lago documents (Cannon’s second outrageous piece of work related to the purloined White House records). The appeals court decision had the feeling of awakening from a bad dream.
Many commentators, including me, had emphasized that the legal and logical failings in Cannon’s rulings were not subtle or even matters of judicial philosophy. Rather they were blunders driven by ludicrously poor and possibly partisan judicial reasoning.
They incorporated such basic missteps as ignoring the need for proof and evidence, and they repeatedly intruded on executive branch territory over issues such as whether assessing damage caused by Donald Trump’s treatment of classified documents required the participation of the FBI.
