Jonathon Turley - This is going to leave a mark for the libtards
The most remarkable thing that occurred on Friday is that nothing occurred on Friday. Only a week before, the Justice Department insisted that the court should not release a single line of the affidavit and that any substantive disclosure would unleash of parade of horribles, from damaging national security to sacrificing witnesses.
For those of us who have litigated cases against the Justice Department,
it was an all-too-familiar claim by a department notorious for over-classification and over-redaction arguments.
For a week, media pundits mouthed the same exaggerated claims and challenged those of us who argued that it was clearly possible to release a redacted affidavit;
liberals suddenly shuddered at the thought of doubting the Justice Department. Sites like Above the Law claimed that calls for greater transparency and a redacted affidavit were akin to “publishing the nuclear codes on the back of every milk carton.” Even after the judge agreed that a redacted affidavit could be released in the public interest, experts balked at the notion as dangerous in light of Justice’s earlier warnings.
As I noted earlier, affidavits contain background legal and factual sections that ordinarily can be unsealed without disclosing sensitive information. That is precisely what happened here. Pages of the affidavit were released that confirmed the legal claims as well as some of the factual allegations.
As in other cases, the Justice Department had falsely claimed that no disclosures could be made without redacting so much as to make the document unintelligible. Yet, no one seemed to notice.
Something else did not happen. In rejecting Justice’s claims that nothing in the affidavit should be released, U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart set out an appellate process by which he could overrule Justice in ordering disclosures beyond those proposed by the department. Given Justice’s well-documented history of over-redacting, it was a promising start.
Then, over the course of the week, media reported a series of leaks of information that clearly was part of the affidavit. At the same time that the government was demanding total secrecy, it was selectively leaking details seemingly designed to put Trump on the defensive.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciar...ago-affidavit/
