Aileen Cannon Still Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Bad At Her Job
And she gets to hold that job for life!
The less-than-discerning reader would be forgiven for thinking, in light of everything the Supreme Court has gleefully fucked up this week/month/decade, that the conservative justices of SCOTUS are absolutely the worst jurists in the entire federal court system. To which Trump ball-washer and abject jackass Aileen Cannon now says, “Me! Me! Don’t forget about me! I also suck!”
It was easy to miss, what with SCOTUS busy rolling back most of the 20th century, but Cannon on Thursday found yet another way to delay the criminal trial of Donald Trump on charges that he stole national security secrets and kept them in cardboard boxes stashed around his dumb Florida estate like he was auditioning for “Hoarders.” After which she probably went to Mar-a-Lago herself and got a nice comped steak dinner, because what’s the point of jamming your thumb down hard on the scale for Cantaloupe Capone if there aren’t some additional bennies in it for you?
Unless you are someone who simply sells yourself cheap to the lowest bidder for the sheer joy of it, which is also a possibility we are entertaining. We’re sure Trump is happy not having to leave cash on the dresser.
Anyway. Here’s what she did:
Cannon said she would hold a hearing to reconsider another judge’s decision to allow prosecutors to pierce the attorney-client privilege of one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers under what is known as the crime-fraud exception.
That other judge was Beryl Howell, then chief federal judge in the DC Circuit Court. Last year, prosecutors from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office wanted to force testimony from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran in the documents case after Corcoran invoked attorney/client privilege to a grand jury. Corcoran had been one of the lawyers who turned over a few documents found at Mar-a-Lago to investigators and allegedly drafted a statement that Trump’s legal team had found everything there was to find after a very thorough search of that discount rack Xanadu in West Palm Beach.
Prosecutors wanted to know if Corcoran was lying when he wrote the statement, or if he knew that Trump was hiding other documents. Judge Howell ruled that in light of those suspicions, Corcoran’s testimony fell under the crime-fraud exception of attorney-client privilege. Therefore, he had to testify.
In other words, sit your ass down with the prosecutors and squeal like a piggy, Evan.
The lawyers out there will be familiar with the concept of collateral estoppel, the legal doctrine that precludes someone from relitigating an issue “in a suit on a different cause of action involving a party to the first case.” Otherwise it might be too easy for, say, a particularly litigious defendant to suck up a court’s time and drag out a trial to argue about something that another judge in a case involving that person already decided on. To cite just one particular possibility that is on our mind for no reason.
Collateral estoppel is not, we are assured, an obscure concept. How often does a judge do what Cannon is doing here? “Pretty fucking rare!!” according to our old colleague snipy. She even was the one who put in both exclamation points.
Cannon, in her usual snotty, defensive way, would like the public to know that she is simply a diligent and thorough jurist and not a Federalist Society hack angling for a Supreme Court nomination in Trump’s next term:
But there is a difference between a resource-wasting and delay-producing “mini-trial,” on the one hand, and an evidentiary hearing geared to adjudicating the contested factual and legal issues on a given pre-trial motion to suppress, on the other.
There is a difference, and every lawyer we have read or heard speak about this says that Aileen Cannon is on the wrong side of it.
In the same ruling, Cannon also allowed Trump’s lawyers to challenge the legality of the Mar-a-Lago search on the grounds that, as best we can tell, she thinks words might mean something other than what they mean:
While she acknowledged it was clear that the agents had permission to take any documents with classification markings, she wanted to know more, she said, about what they were told about phrases in the warrant, like “presidential records” and “national defense information.”
Those terms, which were used to describe the sorts of documents that could be hauled away, “do not carry ‘generally understood meanings,’” she wrote, “such that a law enforcement agent, without further clarification, would have known to identify such material as ‘seizable’ property.”
We’re guessing the FBI can distinguish between records related to Trump’s presidency and documents titled, for example, MELANIA PRE-NUP, but we’ve been wrong before.
Anyway, the result of that ruling is yet another hearing, of course.
So Cannon gets to schedule two more hearings for more ridiculous and flailing appeals from Trump’s defense team, and the trial gets pushed even further down the road. It is now scheduled to take place somewhere in the early 3000s, when it will be presided over by Aileen Cannon’s head in a jar at the Head Museum.
[New York Times / Cannon’s stupid ruling]
Aileen Cannon would really, really, really hate it if you donated to keep Wonkette going, probably.
"While she acknowledged it was clear that the agents had permission to take any documents with classification markings, she wanted to know more, she said, about what they were told about phrases in the warrant, like “presidential records” and “national defense information.”
Those terms, which were used to describe the sorts of documents that could be hauled away, “do not carry ‘generally understood meanings,’” she wrote, “such that a law enforcement agent, without further clarification, would have known to identify such material as ‘seizable’ property.”"
Oh get the FUCK out of here.
Kick this goddamn woman off the case and get a real fucking judge.
Sorry, I have to rant and I can't find the right thread. Just talked to my Trumpy Neighbor and her daughter about the debate. They both insisted that Biden lied just as much as Trump. Huh? I told them abortion after birth is not a thing. They insisted it WAS. I said, killing a baby after birth is called INFANTICIDE and it's a crime. Trumpy Daughter retorted that it was just a "play on words," by which I think she meant "semantics," and that "they" ARE in fact doing that. I would love to see some evidence of this. Then she started in about how abortion was murder, because Bible, and I said, well, we have separation of Church and State. I said, what if we had a Theocracy? We could have a theocracy like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Then they said, no, their religions are different. Presumably "bad" religion, as opposed to theirs, which is "good."
But I could tell they'd LOVE a Christian theocracy government. I dropped it.