Asking Trump’s legal team to agree that the Justice Department’s inventory of the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago is accurate seems harmless enough.

That's just backwards. Trump's legal team has not said to the court (or the master) that the inventory is incorrect or that any of the docs are planted forgeries. The inventory does not reveal the precise contents of each doc - it would have to restate the entire thing to do that - so there is no telling whether any given doc in the inventory is the one actually found or a more incriminating substitute. I have no reason to believe that the DOJ did anything improper, but Trump has no obligation to say to the court, before the docs have been transcribed, that it didn't. Indeed, I can't fathom why Judge Dearie thought it would be appropriate to demand Trump's lawyers say in court at this date what their asshole client is saying out of court or be deemed not to have anything to say.

Likewise, I don't see where the special master is charged with determining whether docs were declassified. His job is to say if they are privileged. He can demand that Trump's lawyers explain why any given doc is privileged, including, if it mattered (I don't see how it would matter), that they had been declassified. The Eleventh Circuit said the issue was a red herring. Why, then, does Judge Dearie care?

I don't offer these arguments in defense of Judge Cannon, whose initial ruling regarding the DOJ and DNI's use of the classified docs was appalling. She seems to me incompetent and biased, if not corrupt. (There is a difference.) And she may well be corrupt. But I think she got this latest ruling right.

The words "In other words" are a sure sign that an author can't make the actual words do what she wants them to do. That's not right. But it's not a crime (and, thanks to Times v. Sullivan), not libel.