Oct.11

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Trump Legal News: Come on, Aileen

We're not doing a daily look at Donald Trump's fraud trial because it's kinda weedy and because there are other outlets where that's their bailiwick. Put another way, if that is what you want, The New York Times and The Washington Post have you covered.

Because the New York Trump trial(s) and the Washington D.C. Trump trial come earlier on the calendar, and because they appear to have a much greater chance of resulting in a guilty verdict, they are sucking up nearly all of the Trump lawbreaking oxygen. That means that Aileen Cannon, down in Florida, is largely flying under the radar. And that, in turn, has allowed her to make some rather questionable decisions without attracting too much attention. Here are the three biggies:

• Two months ago, she refused to seal the government's witness list in the case, despite this being normal procedure. As a result the identities of the witnesses could (and probably will) become public, making it much easier for unhinged Trumpers to commence campaigns of harassment.
  
  
• Last month, she scheduled a special hearing for Trump's co-defendants without providing any written explanation for her reasoning.
  
  
• This month, she authorized a paperless order by which the entire timeline for the trial is on hold, while she considers (yet another) motion from Donald Trump's legal team to delay the trial. Because the trial is going to take weeks (or months), and because a judge's schedule doesn't have all that many multi-month windows, this could have the effect of "inadvertently" pushing the trial back by 3-9 months, even if Cannon does not grant Trump's request.

We are hardly experts in federal criminal procedure, especially since every time we've been put on trial, it's been for state-level offenses. However, those who are experts appear to be near-universal in their disdain for Cannon's management of the case, proposing that she's either not capable of handling a case of this magnitude or that she's putting her finger on the scale for Trump. Of course, it's entirely possible that both are true.

Thus far, Special Counsel Jack Smith has behaved as if all is well and normal, and has not tried to get a higher level of the federal court system involved. In fact, just yesterday his team filed a document with the court that implies that the prosecution knows why Trump took the classified files, and that they can prove it. If so, that would certainly address one of the great mysteries of our time.

Might Smith eventually go to a higher authority to get Cannon overruled, or even removed? It's possible; the experts quoted in the second item linked above say that the lack of written explanation last month mirrors Cannon's earlier screw-up that the appeals court chastised her for, and that two strikes could be enough to have her removed. That said, Smith's calendar is going to be pretty full with the Washington case, where he drew a much better hand than in Florida. And after that, Georgia is likely to move to the front of the line. So, it doesn't matter too much if Cannon drags things out, and Smith might decide that the risk of going over the Judge's head and losing are not worth the reward of going over her head and winning. (Z)