The DOJ Investigation & the Special Master Ruling

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

David Alan Sklansky:  I think that Donald Trump suffers less reputational damage than most people do.  If information is circulated suggesting that he is the subject of a criminal investigation, or even if he was charged in a criminal case.  It’s partly because that’s his brand and it’s partly because he has a platform.  He has no difficulty getting his message out.

[Music]

Intro:  Welcome to the award-winning podcast Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession.  You’re listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:  Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from Southern California. I write a blog named ‘May It Please the Court’ and have two books out titled ‘How to Get Sued and ‘The Sled’.  Well, on September 5, 2022 U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump appointed judge, granted former President Trump’s request for a special master to review record seized by the FBI during its search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, thus delaying the Department of Justice investigation into the alleged actions of the former president, blocking their review of the seized documents.  In response on September 8, the department appealed Judge Cannon’s order citing the delay of review that could be a threat to our national security, so what’s the special master?  Is a special master appropriate in this situation?  And what could it mean for the DOJ investigation?

Today, on Lawyer to Lawyer, we’re going to take a look at this ruling, its potential impact, and the role of a special master, and to help us better understand this issue, we’re joined by David Alan Sklansky.  He is the Stanley Morrison professor of law at Stanford Law School and he is also the faculty co-director at Stanford Criminal Justice Center.  David teaches and writes about criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence.  His newest book is ‘A Pattern of Violence:  How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice.’  It is available at Harvard University Press, was printed in 2021.  Welcome to the show, David.

David Alan Sklansky:  Thanks for having me on, Craig.

J. Craig Williams:  Well, this is certainly interesting and hot topic, but let’s first start off giving our listeners some context about what special master is and how we got into this situation.

David Alan Sklansky:  District Courts often appoint a special master when there’s a massive material that somebody neutral should look over.  The most common context in which arises is when an attorney’s office has been searched pursuant to a search warrant and a determination needs to be made about which materials are covered by attorney-client privilege.  I was a special master in a case like that, so that’s the normal context.  That’s how special masters normally get used.

J. Craig Williams:  I’m going to assume, though that what you’re talking about is in a civil context, not a criminal.

David Alan Sklansky:  No, it can happen in a civil — in a criminal context, too.  In fact, search warrants typically arise in the criminal context and, for example, it was a criminal case where I was brought in as a special master.  The U.S. Attorney’s Office or the Department of Justice typically goes along with and sometimes even request the appointment of a special master because they want to make sure that they’re not looking at materials that are privileged and that will taint their investigation.

J. Craig Williams:  Right, but for those folks that do practice criminal law, there’s this little thing called, “the privilege review team” that’s typically available both in the state district attorney offices as well as federal courts.

David Alan Sklansky:  Yes, and often federal prosecutors will use that they’ll review material in-house as opposed to asking for a special master.  Sometimes, even when material has been reviewed by a special taint team inside the Department of Justice or inside a U.S. Attorney’s Office, the district court will appoint a special master to doublecheck the government’s determinations.  Sometimes the government flags materials as possibly privileged and then has a special master review those.  In this case, the government did have its own review team.  It did flag about some documents as potentially covered by the attorney-client privilege but the special master order that Judge Cannon issued contemplates a much broader review.

J. Craig Williams:  How broad?

David Alan Sklansky:  Well, the parameters still need to be hammered out.  But the original order that Judge Cannon issued seemed to contemplate that the special master would review everything.

(00:05:04)

Which is thousands of documents and other objects that were seized by the government during the search at Mar-a-Lago and review those materials not just to see whether any of them were covered by attorney-client privilege but also to see whether any of them were covered by executive privilege, and possibly also just to determine whether the government has legitimate investigative interests in the materials or if they’re just purely private materials that should be returned to a former President Trump.

J. Craig Williams:  In this situation, we had the original search warrant issued by a Magistrate Bruce Reinhart, in a completely different district.  I know from reading the opinion that there’s an argument that the district where the documents were seized is where an application can be made for a special master but is it unusual in situations like this for another district court judge to take, basically jurisdiction away from where it started?

David Alan Sklansky:  Yeah, it’s one of many, many things that are unusual about this case, but yes, typically, if a special master has been appointed, typically if a search warrant has been issued and there are questions about how the search warrant should be administered including whether a special master should be appointed, you would go to the magistrate judge that issued the warrant, so this is unusual.

J. Craig Williams:  Let’s talk about forum shopping.  How do you get to do that?

David Alan Sklansky:  Well, the argument is exactly what you said, Craig, that the former President Trump’s lawyers say that has the court sitting in the place where a warrant was executed has inherent authority to issue an extraordinary circumstances, injunctions that are required in the interest of justice and their argument is that there are extraordinary circumstances here that require the appointment of a special master, and that gives the district court where the search was carried out jurisdiction.

J. Craig Williams:  Yeah, I’m sure from reading the opinion myself, just as a novice in the area of this situation, I think as anybody is, how many times have we had search warrants executed against former presidents, right?

David Alan Sklansky:  Never.  We’ve never had a situation where a former president is facing even one criminal investigation.  Let alone, I think we’re at five at this point, running concurrently, depending on how you count.

J. Craig Williams:  Yeah.  There’s an awful lot of insanity at play here from these situations.  But let’s get back to being the special master in this situation.  What happens now?  Apparently, the Department of Justice and the Trump team have agreed on a special master, so now they’re going to turn that over to the court and hammer out those details.

David Alan Sklansky:  Well, yeah.  The first thing is that the district judge needs to make a number of determinations about how her order is going to be carried out.  First, she needs to decide whether who should be the special master, and she asked both parties to submit suggested names and then to tell her if they had any objection to the names submitted by the other party.  Former President Trump’s lawyers objected to all the potential special masters who were proposed by the government but the government said that it had no objection to one of the suggestions made by Trump’s lawyers.  This is a senior district judge, former U.S. Attorney.  The fact that both parties say that he would be acceptable and that he apparently has indicated that he’s willing to take on the assignment, make him the odds-on favorite to be appointed.

In some ways, it’s the easiest decision that Judge Cannon needs to make.  The next decision she needs to make is whether to grant a partial stay of her order pending appeal.  The government has asked her to stay only a small part of the order.  They have asked her to grant a stay with regard to the portion of the order that covers roughly 100 documents that are marked classified and that were seized in the search of Mar-a-Lago, and the government says those documents shouldn’t be subject to review by the special master and they should be allowed to continue to use those documents in their investigations, both their criminal investigation and the ongoing inquiry into the ramifications of any security breach that’s occurred.  That’s in a way, what might be an attractive off ramp for the judge because it’s a compromise.

(00:09:58)

The government is willing to go along with a special master that will review the vast majority of the materials that were seized during the search.  They’re not asking for a stay of the part of the order that suggests that the special master should do more than screen for attorney-client privilege.

The special master should also screen for possible executive privilege and possibly also for materials that are purely private and don’t have legitimate investigative importance, so in a way, they’re going a long way toward meeting the judge in the middle and saying they’re just asking for this one small part of the order to be stayed pending appeal, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the judge agrees to that.  There’s also a question about how long the special master should be given to carry out this work.  The Department of Justice suggests a couple of weeks should be sufficient.  Trump’s lawyers say that the special master should be given three months to carry out the work, so the judge needs to figure that out.  Part of that may be trying to figure out exactly what the special master is supposed to be doing, because, as I mentioned, the normal context in which a special master is appointed has to do with the attorney-client privilege where the legal standards are relatively clear.

For example, when I was a special master, I was reviewing materials seize in a search to determine whether any of them were potentially covered by attorney-client privilege.  The rules about what materials are covered by attorney-client privilege are relatively straightforward, so I was just applying pretty clear rules.  With regard to an executive privilege claim raised by a former president against the current executive branch.  The standards are anything but clear.  In fact, the Department of Justice asserts that there is no such thing as executive privilege against the current executive branch.

J. Craig Williams:  Right, there could only be one holder of the executive privilege at the time, and hasn’t Trump lost that privilege now?  The same as hasn’t he lost the attorney-client privilege?

David Alan Sklansky:  Well, he might have.  I mean, he might have lost the executive privilege by not asserting it, but he may also have lost the executive privilege because he’s not the executive anymore.

J. Craig Williams:  Right, that’s what I meant.

David Alan Sklansky:  But the law isn’t clear about the degree, the circumstances in which a former president can assert executive privilege contrary to the wishes of the current administration.  In fact, in January of this year, the Supreme Court said in a short opinion that the question of whether and under what circumstances a former president can assert executive privilege in the face of a determination by the current administration to waive it are unsettled.

Now, that was the case that concerned whether former President Trump could assert executive privilege against Congress.  It goes a further step to suggest that he could assert executive privilege against the current executive branch and my own view is that the Department of Justice is right, that a privilege in that context doesn’t make any sense.  It’s difficult to see how you could say that the current executive branch isn’t allowed to look at materials that document how executive branch decisions were made in previous administrations.  It’s just hard to see how the government could function.

J. Craig Williams:  Right, and in the face of the Presidential Records Act, it would seem impossible that a former president could assert anything over documents he shouldn’t have in the first place.

David Alan Sklansky:  Yeah, interestingly enough, Trump’s lawyer says that the Presidential Records Act supports their claim because it gives the former president absolute access to presidential records.  There are a couple of problems with that.  One is that saying that the former president has access is different from saying that he can prevent the current executive branch from looking at or using the documents.  The other problem is that it’s not clear that all these records qualify as presidential records as opposed to records of other branches of the government.

J. Craig Williams:  When you take a look at the judge who’s going to be the special master, regardless of how long he’s going to get to take to do this work, does he have the current clearances to potentially look at top secret documents and the ones that are even more than that, the nuclear secrets?

David Alan Sklansky:  Yeah, I don’t know.  That’s a good question.  That may be another factor that would slow the process down.  There’s also a question about whether somebody who is currently on the bench, although on senior status, can accept an assignment of this kind.  The government has flagged that issue, but everybody seems to think that that issue — the issue of whether the judge could take this on while he’s on senior status is resolvable.

(00:15:03)

The question you raised, though, about security clearance is a really good one.  I don’t know what current security clearances he has.  He did serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the past, but it’s not clear whether and to what extent any of the clearances that he held in the past are still active.

J. Craig Williams:  The Department of Justice has supposedly made an appeal here.

David Alan Sklansky:  Yeah, they’ve said that they are appealing the part of the order that covers documents that are marked classified and that’s the part that they want the — with regard to which they want the judge to stay the order pending appeal.  Their argument is that these are documents where the reasons for thinking that there might be some claims of privilege are especially weak, and where the interference with legitimate government interests are especially grave.  Their argument is that if you have documents that are marked classified, the argument that those could be covered by executive privilege, that documents marked classified could be exempt from review by the current executive branch seems especially insane to use a technical term and conversely, they say those are the documents that are particularly important for them to review to determine not just whether there are active security breaches that they need to address.

There have been reports for example, that some of these documents may include information about human sources that could be compromised and endangered but also to determine whether there are grounds to think that federal criminal laws were violated by removing these documents by keeping them in Trump’s Resort in Florida, and whether there’s reason to think that there is obstruction of justice arising from the failure of the former president and his team to return these documents and possible efforts to conceal that documents were taken and retained that shouldn’t have been.

J. Craig Williams:  Well, David, I can’t believe I have to stop this conversation, but here we are.  Let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors.  We’ll be right back.

[Music]

Female 1:  As a lawyer, ever wish you could be in two places at once?  You could take a call when you’re in court.  Capture a lead during a meeting.  That’s where Posh comes in. We’re a live virtual receptionist who answer and transfer your calls so you never miss an opportunity, and the Posh app lets you control when your receptionist steps in so, if you can’t answer, Posh can.  And if you’ve got it, Posh is just a tap away.  With Posh, you can save as much as 40% off your current service provider’s rates.  Start your free trial today at posh.com.

J. Craig Williams:  And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network.  This is Craig Williams.  I’m joined by David Alan Sklansky.  He’s a professor of law at Stanford Law School and faculty co-director at Stanford Criminal Justice Center.  Well, David, right before the break, you used the word insane.  I used it in the beginning.  There’s an awful lot of people that disagree with this ruling.  What are the problems with the reasoning in it?

David Alan Sklansky:  Well, the first problem is you need to get your head around the idea that there could be an executive privilege in a former president as against the current executive branch.  You need to get your head around the idea that it makes sense to think that when a president leaves office, he can say, there are documents relating to the work that I did running the government that my successor is not allowed to see because they have to do with how decisions were made inside the executive branch.

For many people, including — I have to say, for me, that’s a non-starter because it just seems completely unworkable.  Then you need to get your head around the idea that it makes sense to appoint a special master in this case to protect that interest, even if it does exist, as opposed to letting the process play out the way it normally would and allowing the President to assert a privileged claim in the criminal process if he thinks that it would be viable.  There’s the question of jurisdiction and venue, which you raised at the top of the program, and there’s the issue of whether it makes any sense to think that the president has a legitimate privilege claim that could be raised after he slept on his rights for several weeks following the search and failed to assert this interest.

Beyond that, this is an equitable order.  It’s an injunction, so it requires a balancing of interests and one thing that many people had criticized the judge for, I think, justifiably is that her balancing of interest seems off.  On the one hand, she gave very little weight to the government’s interest in conducting its criminal investigation.

(00:20:06)

She did give weight to the government’s interest in carrying out its security review, in determining whether there’s reason to think that sources have been compromised or the national security has been compromised in some way by the way these documents have been handled and figuring out what needs to be done.  She said that kind of work can continue but in her weighing of the equities, she seemed to give little or no weight to the government’s interest in expeditiously carrying out his criminal investigation.

On the other hand, she gave an enormous amount of weight, again, in a way that strikes many people, including me as inappropriate to the President’s personal interest.  She said that this case differs from a normal criminal — the execution of a search warrant in a normal case because President Trump has a much greater interest than most people do in avoiding the embarrassment of a criminal charge, because as a former president his reputational interests are higher than an ordinary person and that’s the judge suggested justifies bringing the special master in to double check to make sure that this investigation really is warranted.  That strikes me as, first of all, an unprecedented step to take in a criminal investigation.

To say, in addition to concerns about privilege, I just want to make sure that the documents the government has have legitimate investigative value.  But beyond that, I think in a country where no one is supposed to be above the law, where we’re supposed to be governed by laws and not by individuals, it doesn’t sit right to say that certain people, because of jobs that they held, get special protection from the inconveniences of being the subject of a criminal investigation or the defendant in a criminal case.  I think it’s particularly hard to credit in the case of Donald Trump because his brand is entirely wrapped up in the idea that he is in battle against the government.

I think that Donald Trump suffers less reputational damage than most people do.  If information is circulated suggesting that he is the subject of a criminal investigation, or even if he was charged in a criminal case, it’s partly because that’s his brand, and it’s partly because he has a platform.  He has no difficulty getting his message out so the balancing of equities that Judge Cannon carried out struck a lot of people, including me, as unbalanced in two respects.  It overvalued Trump’s interest and it undervalued the government’s interest.

J. Craig Williams:  Kind of reminds me of the quote from Star Trek when Spock was dying, when he said, “the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the one.”

David Alan Sklansky:  You know, everything we needed to learn, we learned from Star Trek.

J. Craig Williams:  Exactly correct.  Well, David, it’s time for another quick break to hear a word from our sponsors.  We’ll be right back.

As a lawyer, insurance is one of the last parts of your job you want to spend unbillable hours on.  That’s why thousands of lawyers have switched to Embroker.  Embroker offers A+ rated insurance for law firms.  You can quote and buy instantly online.  And if you need help, they have experts on standby.  Go from sign up to purchase in 15 minutes by visiting embroker.com/law.  That’s E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com/law.

And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network.  I’m back with David Alan Sklansky.  We’ve been discussing this Trump brand and this Trump supposed reputational right and perhaps whether it’s right or wrong, but that’s not even as you said in the beginning, that’s not even the standard.  It is the right of the American people that outweigh the right of President Trump, no matter what.

David Alan Sklansky:  Yeah.  The fact is, it’s very unpleasant to be the subject of a criminal investigation.  It’s even more unpleasant to be a criminal defendant.  But we have procedures that are set up to protect those interests.  Those procedures fail in lots of ways and need to be fixed in lots of ways but this particular fix that anytime there’s a criminal investigation, if it’s a famous or influential person who’s targeted all of the material seized in the search warrants have to be reviewed by a special master.  That’s not a good way to try to fix criminal procedure and if it’s not a good way to fix criminal procedure in general, it shouldn’t be something that’s given to Donald Trump.

J. Craig Williams:  And how does her being appointed by President Trump play into this?  Should she be recusing herself at this point?

David Alan Sklansky:  No, I don’t think she should be recusing herself.

(

00:25:00)

I mean, it’s common for judges who are appointed by a particular president or a particular administration to have to rule on claims against that president or that administration.  That kind of argument that the judge needs to recuse himself or herself, because I think they’re on the other side.  That’s an argument that Trump makes frequently about juris who he disagrees with.  But I think it’s a bad argument when Trump makes it and I think the government is correct not to make that argument here.

J. Craig Williams:  We’ve talked about part of the opinion that the DOJ has appealed, and I see here that the judge has issued a temporary injunction ruling that somehow Trump has the likelihood of success on the merits.  Do you believe that’s been demonstrated?

David Alan Sklansky:  No, I don’t.  But that’s partly because I think that the way the judge has thought about executive privilege doesn’t make any sense and the suggestion in the order that maybe Trump has some right to have an independent third party determine whether the government has legitimate investigative interest in the material or whether it’s too private and should be returned to him, I don’t think that that warrants the appointment of a special master either.

J. Craig Williams:  Is the DOJ right now and joined from pursuing its investigation?

David Alan Sklansky:  Yes, they are and they have stalled much of the investigation because — well, I should clarify, they’re not enjoying from carrying out an investigation.   They are enjoy joined from using any of the materials that they seized in the search as part of that investigation and that includes using information from the materials that they’ve already obtained because remember, this motion wasn’t made until a couple of weeks after the search took place.  The government has already reviewed a lot of these documents, and right now they are enjoying from making use of anything they learn from the documents or from using the documents in any way for the purposes of their criminal case.

The government has asserted that it doesn’t make sense to try to separate out the criminal investigation from the national security inquiry, but they’ve agreed to go along with the judge’s order.  Aside from the 100 or so documents that are marked classified, which they say should be exempt, Trump’s lawyers say, “No, those documents shouldn’t be exempt because we can’t just trust the government that those are actually classified just because they were marked classified.  Maybe they’re not classified or they shouldn’t be classified.”  But as I said before, I think the government’s argument that the mere fact that they are marked classified indicates that Trump’s claims to have some protection against the administration using them are particularly weak, and the government’s need to look at the documents is particularly strong.  That argument makes a lot of sense to me.  I think this is an attractive off ramp for the judge to take.  I think it’s a way for her to keep the vast majority of her order intact while accommodating the government’s particular concerns about a small set of documents.

J. Craig Williams:  Let’s talk about three equal branches here.  We have the judicial branch at this point saying, “Stop.”  And on the other hand, we have the executive branch saying we need to continue our investigation and move this forward and use these documents but there’s another concern here.  There’s been some identification of reports regarding foreign nations nuclear capabilities, defense capabilities.  As you mentioned earlier, there’s been some human intelligence issues that are in these documents, and there’s been an allegation by the CIA that ever since Trump took office, our people overseas have been getting killed more frequently than they were with any other president so we think he may have been trading in these documents even during his presidency.  Where are we going on this?  Are we going to reach a treason point?  Are we espionage?  How do we balance these branches, our national security interests, against the judicial branch?

David Alan Sklansky:  Well, I think it’s very hard to figure out where this is going to go and what we’re going to learn, because we keep learning new things every week, and it’s hard to know what story these documents will tell and what story will be told once people connected with these documents other than Trump start being questioned by the government about them.  I do think that given the concerns about the high level of sensitivity of these documents, it is particularly important that a thorough review take place immediately and expeditiously about what secrets may have been compromised.

(00:30:05)

Because the problem is that if there is material in these documents, the government may not be in a position to know how those documents have been handled since they were taken from the White House.  Who was shown those documents?  Not just who was shown those documents inside Trump circle, but whether Trump or anybody else shared those documents with potentially hostile governments overseas so it’s a major, major concern.

One of the government’s arguments for staying the order with regard to the hundred documents that are marked classified is that they say that it’s a practical matter.  It is difficult for the CIA and the intelligence community to carry out that assessment without working hand in hand with the criminal investigators at the FBI, so they need both.  They need all hands-on deck with regard to those documents, not just to determine whether a criminal case can be brought, but to determine what information may have been compromised and what steps may need to be taken to protect all kinds of secrets of the United States.  Nuclear secrets, human source secrets, and so on.

J. Craig Williams:  There are a million more questions in my head about this thing, as I’m sure you know exists in it, but we’re about to reach the end of our program, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wrap up and get your final thoughts with this whole thing.  But as part of that, do you think any of these documents might be somewhere else in Trump’s domain?  I mean, I’ve seen a photograph of a classified folder behind his bar.

David Alan Sklansky:  Yeah, I think it’s very hard to have confidence that the government has retrieved all the sensitive documents that were improperly taken to Mar-a-Lago given the haphazard way in which the documents appear to have been handled, and given the fact that the government appears to have been lied to by Trump’s attorneys about whether all the documents that were classified had been returned and it’s not clear whether who the attorneys were relying on when they made those representations but the bottom line is difficult.

I think it’s impossible to be confident that all the confidential documents have been returned at this point and for me, one of the most telling details about this whole episode is that there are reports that when the FBI agents were carrying out the search, they became alarmed because they didn’t have security clearance necessary to look at some of the documents that they were finding.  That’s how sensitive these documents are and they’ve cavalier way in which they were handled by former President Trump, I think should be a very, very great concern and alarm to all Americans, wholly aside from whether or he winds up having any criminal liability arising because of his handling of the documents.

J. Craig Williams:  Right, let’s just swirl one more thing into the end of it.  We have evidence that there have been foreign nationals that were admitted as members of the club, some Russian princesses who weren’t even.

David Alan Sklansky:  I do think that no matter what Trump’s attitudes were towards foreign governments, no matter how carefully a person he was, the idea that he would take sensitive documents and keep them at this private club where paid members can circulate it would be very worrisome but it is particularly worrisome.  It’s even more worrisome given the fact that Trump has a long history of friendliness towards and coziness with some particularly frightening and dangerous foreign leaders, including Vladimir Putin.

J. Craig Williams:  It is quite scary.  Well, David, it looks like we’ve reached the end of our program so I’d like to take this opportunity to have you share your last final thoughts and your contact information, if you’d like, for our listeners to reach out to you.

David Alan Sklansky:  I’m happy to share my contact information.  The best way to reach me is by email.  The email is [email protected].  Sklansky is S-K-L-A-N-S-K-Y and it’s at stanford.edu.  I guess my final thoughts are that, I think it’s important for all Americans to try to think about what a sensible resolution would be in a case like this, and to try to think about resolutions that will be broadly acceptable, even to people who disagree with them.

(00:34:58)

Judge Cannon said that she thought a special master should be appointed because it was particularly important in this case for there to avoid any appearance of impropriety, for there to be an appearance of fairness as well as actual fairness.  I think those are the correct concerns.  I don’t think appointing a special master necessarily helps in that regard, but I do think that it’s good to try to figure out procedures that can be trusted by people who hold a wide range of views and I am happy that the government’s posture in this case has been to try to find a compromise that will safeguard what’s most important to them, while also agreeing to procedures that they don’t think are appropriate and which I don’t think are appropriate, but which the government thinks that they can live with.

J. Craig Williams:  Well, David.  Thank you.  This has been an absolutely fascinating discussion, and I’m not sure that I can add much more to it, but I sure have more questions about it.  In any event, thank you very much.  We’ve had Professor David Alan Sklansky from Stanford Law School, and it’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

David Alan Sklansky:  Thank you.  It’s been a pleasure speaking with you, Craig.

J. Craig Williams:  Well, as Professor Sklansky said, the word insanity has been tossed around quite a bit, not only between the two of us, but also between — seen in a lot of media outlets that have come out criticizing this order.

Let’s talk about that a little bit.  The just crap news that we have, because there’s no editor, there’s no vetting, there are no factual checks of these documents.  I mean, back in the day when newspapers were out there, you couldn’t get past an editor.  The editor would go, “Let me see your source notes.  Who did you talk to?  When did you talk to them?  What did they say to you?  Is this what they said?  Or are you spinning it?”  You have to get past the editor and then you see the stuff that’s written these days.  It’s written in the first person, it’s written full of opinion and as soon as you start seeing opinion coming out in something you’re reading, just discard it because it’s just one person’s opinion.

It’s really hard to be to have, I believe I have that kind of critical thing because the cynical aspect of it, because I was trained that way in law school, plus my undergraduate degrees in communication arts, so I was a journalist and I understand the newsroom process about way that you get something printed, you get a story assigned to, you go out and search it, you comeback and discuss it at the table with the editor, you go and you write it up.  It goes through several drafts.  It goes through an independent branch in the newspaper office where they verify all the facts.  It’s not the editor, it’s not the reporter.  It’s an independent review team.  They call the sources to say, “Did you say this?  Did you say this?  Did you say this?”  And that doesn’t happen today.  What can you rely on is the truth these days?

Well, if you’ve like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcast.  Your favorite podcasting app.  You can also visit us at the legaltalknetwork.com or you can sign up for our newsletter.  I’m Craig Williams.  Thanks for listening.  Please join us next time for another great legal topic.  Remember, when you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

[Music]

Outro:  Thanks for listening to Lawyer 2 Lawyer, produced by the broadcast professionals at Legal Talk Network.  Subscribe to the RSS feed on legaltalknetwork.com or in iTunes.

The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries.  None of the content should be considered legal advice.  As always, consult a lawyer.

[Music]