From “GOP attorneys general back Trump in court fight over Mar-a-Lago documents,” by Andrew Jeong and Amy B Wang, in Wednesday’s Washington Post:

Texas’s Ken Paxton and 10 other GOP state attorneys general came to the defense of former president Donald Trump on Tuesday in his legal fight over documents the FBI seized last month, filing an amicus brief in a federal appellate court that argued the Biden administration could not be trusted.

In a 21-page document that repeated numerous right-wing talking points but that experts said broke little new legal ground, the officials accused the Biden administration of “ransacking” Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of the former president, during an Aug. 8 court-authorized FBI raid and of politicizing the Justice Department.

(WV’s AG Morrisey was one of the eleven.)

As the Post further explains:

Amicus briefs are documents filed by parties not directly involved in a legal contest to inform judges of additional, relevant information. But the one filed by the attorneys general reads more like a political document than a legal brief, legal experts said.

Steve Benen at MSNBC makes a similar point:

Right off the bat, the existence of this amicus brief is weird, since literally all of the underlying questions in this case involve federal issues. There are no state interests here — except to the extent that 11 Republican state attorneys general, led by a scandal-plagued and indicted Texan, feel the need to rally behind a former Republican president.

And from the Post:

The brief is “of course a political stunt,” said Jon D. Michaels, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies presidential powers. “The officials are playing to the fierce MAGA bases in their states,” he said.

For those who like to speculate: What are the chances that a West Virginia stenographer will ask Morrisey why the state should be involved in defending Donald Trump? (As someone who has occasionally wagered on sporting events, I would rate it equal to the chances that the Pirates will win this year’s National League pennant.)