Legal Left Blasts ‘Trumpist’ Judge’s ‘Special Master’ Decision: Like ‘Dred Scott’

Leading lights on the academic left are lashing out against Judge Aieleen M. Cannon, the federal judge in Florida who granted former President Donald Trump’s request for a “special master” to review materials seized in last month’s raid at Mar-a-Lago.

As Breitbart News reported Monday, Judge Cannon approved a special master to review documents seized by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to weed out those possibly implicating attorney-client privilege, and gave both sides until Sep. 8 to propose candidates for the post. She also said that Trump’s claim of executive privilege over some documents from his presidency might be valid.

Left-wing scholars and legal experts are furious, and many lashed out against Judge Cannon, claiming that she was acting out of political motives and even an accomplice to “obstruction of justice.” Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said:

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe claimed that the judge’s decision was like Dred Scott — the 19th-century case that legitimized slavery — or like Korematsu, the case that approved the Roosevelt administration’s internment of Japanese-Americans:

Tribe, who is commonly regarded as a liberal advocate of civil liberties, seemed to reject the idea that they apply equally to the former president, and speculated that Judge Cannon “must’ve seen this as her dress rehearsal for a future SCOTUS seat.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.