Dem
51
GOP
49
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is slow-walking the trial of Donald Trump for holding classified documents he had no right to take with him after he left the White House. She is also working on jury instructions now, despite the trial probably being many months away. She has asked both Special Counsel Jack Smith and Trump's lawyers to propose jury instructions based on two scenarios. The first proposal assumes the president has the authority under the PRA (Presidential Records Act) to categorize any record as personal, rather than belonging to the government. The second proposal would let the jury examine individual documents and let them decide if they belonged to the president or the government.
Smith filed a motion arguing, in no uncertain terms, that both proposals are wrong and are based on a fundamentally flawed legal premise that the PRA grants the president or anyone else the authority to label government documents as personal. He said that all the seized documents are unquestionably presidential documents, many of them classified. The president can declassify documents, but there is a specific procedure for doing that and Trump did not follow it. There is no telepathic declassification procedure. He also said that the jury should be asked simply to determine whether Trump willfully kept national defense secrets at home without any authorization to do so. Smith said that if the judge goes with either scenario, he would appeal the decision. That would be a win for Trump, of course, since his goal is to delay the trial until after the election.
So by proposing only scenarios that Smith says are simply unacceptable, Cannon is practically forcing an appeal and thus a major time delay. She may lose on appeal, but if her goal is to help Trump by buying time, this strategy could well work. If she's merely incompetent, well, Trump still gets what he wants, which is time. (V)