Court also acknowledges Joe Biden helped initiate criminal probe of his chief Republican rival, alarming many.

By John Solomon, Just The News, September 6, 2022:

​A criminal probe “requested by the incumbent president.” The seizure of clothing, medical records, tax records and 500 pages of attorney-client privileged documents not covered by a warrant. The sharing of privileged documents with investigators.

More than simply appointing a special master to referee an evidence dispute, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon exposed this week a Justice Department search of former President Donald Trump’s home that was initiated by his chief Democrat rival, that was carried out so sloppily that it violated the “least intrusive” mandate in the FBI agent’s manual, and that failed to keep legally-protected materials from falling into the hands of investigators.

The problems uncovered so far placed Trump “at risk of suffering injury from the Government’s retention and potential use of privileged materials,” Cannon wrote, adding that a future indictment of the ex-president based on the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago “would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”

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CLICK HERE TO VIEW: SpecialMasterOrder.pdf

In other words, Cannon was not convinced by the Justice Department’s argument that its honor system — known as “filter” or “taint” teams — was adequate to protect the 45th president’s constitutional rights. “The Court takes a different view on this record,” she wrote.

Cannon’s Labor Day ruling is simply an opening salvo. Whether Trump’s claims of executive privilege, attorney-client privilege or an unconstitutional, overly broad search prevail will be decided some time in the future.

But one thing is clear. The FBI and its overseers at the Biden Justice Department bumbled on what was certain to be one of the most scrutinized search warrant executions in modern American history. And that’s according to one of the bureau’s own former and highly respected executives.

“The more that’s revealed, the more it looks like a kind of sloppy government overreach is in play,” former Assistant FBI Director of Intelligence Kevin Brock told Just the News. “It seems more than a bit ‘loose’ to those of us who have executed numerous search warrants.”

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and avowed Democrat, said the judge’s ruling cited the sort of FBI failures that in the past would have enraged liberals who have gone silent about such concerns in the Trump era.

“Many faculty on the left continue the curious objections to a court seeking review of the FBI or not accepting its overbroad claims of authority,” Turley wrote Tuesday. “It is a bizarre shift that we have seen in other Trump investigations where liberals suddenly express shock that a court would override sweeping national security claims or seek to review the Justice Department’s review of material for privilege.

Turley noted that there “appears to have been mistakes by the taint team and that privileged material (as well as an assortment of private material from medical records to tax records) were seized.”

To appreciate the concerns of experts like Brock and Turley, one need only scan the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, or DIOG, the documents most FBI agents regard as their on-the-job bible.

The investigative manual requires FBI agents to use the “least intrusive” means of gathering evidence, especially when it comes to “sensitive investigative matters” like a probe of a former president where privileges and First Amendment are front and center.

That means framing a search in the narrowest possible terms to avoid communications protected by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. “Rigorous obedience to constitutional principles ensures that individually and institutionally our adherence to constitutional guarantees is more important than the outcome of any single interview, search for evidence, or investigation,” the manual states.

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