'Very, very troubling': Judges, lawyers flummoxed by Judge Cannon

[mahatmakanejeeves]

THE TRUMP CASES
‘Very, very troubling’: Judges, lawyers flummoxed by Judge Cannon

The jurist overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida has raised eyebrows and alarms with her latest order

By Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein
March 20, 2024 at 2:38 p.m. EDT



Aileen M. Cannon speaks remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination to serve as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in 2020. (U.S. Senate/AP)

Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon. ... “In my 30 years as a trial judge, I have never seen an order like this,” said Jeremy Fogel, who served on the federal bench in California and now runs the Berkeley Judicial Institute.

On Monday evening, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ordered the defense lawyers and the prosecutors in the case to file submissions outlining proposed jury instructions based on two scenarios, each of which badly misstates the law and facts of the case, according to legal experts. ... She has given the sides two weeks to craft jury instructions around competing interpretations of the Presidential Records Act, often referred to as the PRA. While the law says presidential records belong to the public and are to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a presidency, Trump’s lawyers have argued the PRA gave Trump the right to keep classified materials as his personal property.

“What she has asked the parties to do is very, very troubling,” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts, said of Cannon. “She is giving credence to arguments that are on their face absurd. She is ignoring a raft of other motions, equally absurd, that are unreasonably delaying the case.”

Trump’s team has argued that under the PRA, he automatically designated the classified records he is accused of willfully retaining as personal documents when he removed them from the White House and took them to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club. Prosecutors and legal experts have rejected Trump’s interpretation and said the former president’s reading of the PRA is simply wrong.

{snip}

By Devlin Barrett
Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 and 2022. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting. Twitter https://twitter.com/DevlinBarrett

By Perry Stein
Perry Stein covers the Justice Department and FBI for The Washington Post. She previously covered D.C. education. Before she joined The Post in 2015, she was a staff writer for Washington City Paper and wrote for the Miami Herald. Twitter https://twitter.com/perrystein

[brush]

1. I would say she herself is flummoxed and her dumb ass should be taken off the case...

as it's so evident that again, she has issued a ruling that favors criminal defendant trump.

She should be yanked of the case asap.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Where is the Intelligence community on this? These laws are about to be sundered.

National security is at stake.

[Irish_Dem]

3. No one is confused in the least.

Everyone knows the fix is in.

When the hell is Jack Smith going to do the right thing?

[nakocal]

4. Cannon should be removed from the case

and then be charged as an accessory after the fact.