Can you imagine a court saying, "Sure any president can take whatever documents he wants with him when he leaves office"?

Next, the DOJ repeats earlier arguments about why Cannon didn't have jurisdiction in the first place, and why Cannon erred in issuing the injunction preventing the DOJ from continuing its criminal investigation.

(Part of that injunction was already lifted pending the appeal)

Oral arguments are set for Tuesday.

7/

Here's how it's done⬇️ (Appellate Lawyering 101):

First you say that the court shouldn't even consider the argument.

Then you go on to say that even if the court does consider it, the argument has no merit (and you explain why).

The argument has no merit because the Presidential Records Act doesn't allow a president to convert any docs into personal records and keep them.

In fact, the whole point of the PRA is that records generated by the president belong to the government.

6/

Trump never even mentioned the "the documents were all personal" argument until the appeal.

He never said a word about it in the district court.

Here is what you don't get to do: You don't get to raise issues for the first time on appeal because the issue was never litigated.

(In Trump's case, of course, it was never litigated because he just thought it up when nothing else was working.)

5/

Is this thread working?

"Fizzled" is a recognized legal term. 😆

Because his executive privilege and attorney-client privileges fizzled, he shifted to a new argument: All the documents he took, including those with classified markings, were "personal."

Remember that from Trump's brief? It's absurd.

He claimed that as president, he could designate any documents as personal, and the very act of taking them from the White House meant he designated them personal.

3/

(I'm going to try to thread this by enlisting the posts after the first. I hope this works.)

Anyway, Plaintiff (Trump) has now largely abandoned the claim that the documents should be withheld from the DOJ based on executive privilege (a claim that was always absurd).

Attorney-client disputes come down to a single portion of a 1-page document, which should have been resolved by the magistrate judge.

In other words, his claims fizzled out.

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