Can magistrate judges constitutionally issue search warrants?
According to the Constitution, judges must be appointed by the President. This magistrate judge is not. At least, that is how I am reading this article in the Federalist.
If this is challenged in court, how long would it take to make its way to the Supreme Court?
There isn't any opinion in the article about the possibility of challenging the legality of this search warrant in court.
Aug 10, 2022
This post comes as a consequence of a bit of sloppiness on my part. It is embarrassing to have to correct an error. Hopefully, there won't be more like it.
The FBI raid on Trump is all over the news. I thought I saw an angle to post on it, but there's where the error occurred. My reading of the news showed that this wasn't a Federal Judge, so I thought it was a State Judge. If I had double-checked, I would have found that a magistrate is a federal position. Therefore, I was wrong. If I hadn't been so eager to see what I wanted to see, I would have double-checked and found the error before I posted it.
The post was up for about 3 hours. I found the mistake and took it down. Since I believe that truth is all important, I decided to do this mea culpa for the sake of truth. There's a chance nobody saw it anyway. Why bother? That would be an equivocation of sorts. A lie, but a little one. Better to fess up to even little known errors than to commit even a small lie.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter. But what if people did that in general, as opposed to telling the big lies that seem to get told all the time?
It may not seem to matter because nobody saw it. But maybe just one person did. I'd rather not that something even so seemingly insignificant should happen. It does matter to me even if it doesn't matter to anyone else. Perhaps that is one thing I will allow for myself.
I will keep the original post with a couple notes within the text to cite the error. Other than that, it is the same.
I must be losing it. My apologies.
Note: This post has a factual error, so I took it down.
FBI raid on Trump ( will be corrected)
One thing that really stands out to me is this judge. The judge isn't even a Federal judge. He is a state judge. ????????? {Note: WRONG. No excuses for an error like this. I jumped to conclusions.}
You find speculation on whether this was about Federal records that Trump supposedly had, or it was about J6. Both of these were Federal in a Federal jurisdiction. Why ask a state judge to approve a warrant sought by a Federal agency in a state in another part of the country?
Sometimes something like this could be a courtesy in a routine case, but this is anything but. This is ground breaking. It is unprecedented. Why go to the minor leagues, so to speak, when it is a major league issue? It's like sending a minor leaguer up to bat in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, and it is game 7 of the World Series. When the stakes are so high, why THIS judge?
Did the FBI choose this judge because he was the one most likely to grant their warrant? He is a Obama campaign donor for heaven's sake.
I'm no legal expert, but this alone makes me suspicious. Procedures and precedents matter. But they appeared to have busted through all that like it was nothing.
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