Jack Smith Officially Asks 11th Circuit To Hand Judge Aileen Cannon Her Ass Again
He asked nicely, though.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has at last taken Trump Judge Aileen Cannon to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to get her wagon fixed, and he was a lot nicer about it than we would’ve been. Really, he was so nice and professional, and he wasn’t mean to Cannon hardly at all, at least not in language she’d understand.
We are here because, in what Judge Cannon hoped was her final act of hackery on behalf of her client, the criminal defendant, she dismissed the stolen classified documents case against Donald Trump in July, based on the legal reasoning of some bullshit she made up on the fly about how nobody has the authority to appoint a special counsel, ever, not without specific congressional approval or congressionally appropriated funds.
The truth, as we have discussed numerous times, is that Cannon was obviously and ridiculously out of her depth with this case, and due to her Swiftie-level partisanship on behalf of Trump was rendered paralyzed from acting as a normal American judge. (Of course, she performed exactly as Trump wishes judges to perform, which is why she got the job in the first place.)
Interestingly, Smith didn’t call for Cannon to be removed from the case or hurled into outer space or anything drastic like that. Maybe he respects the appellate judges enough to trust they can figure that one out on their own.
PREVIOUSLY!
It’s not that Smith fully held back. His lawyers wrote in their lengthy filing that Cannon’s legal theories that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed were “novel” and “lack merit.” He noted that if the special counsel investigating Trump is illegal, so too must be the special counsel investigating and prosecuting Hunter Biden.
And if the Justice Department can’t appoint special counsels, then can any department appoint anyone ever, if it’s not specially laid out in the law?
“If the Attorney General lacks the power to appoint inferior officers, that conclusion would invalidate the appointment of every member of the Department who exercises significant authority and occupies a continuing office, other than the few that are specifically identified by statute,” Smith’s office wrote in the 81-page filing.
“The district court’s rationale would likewise raise questions about hundreds of appointments throughout the Executive Branch, including in the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, and Labor,” the prosecutors added.
Bet she didn’t think about any of that.
Dipshit.
Those who have been watching this case from the beginning will remember that the 11th Circuit had to eviscerate and berate Cannon early and often for her mishandling of it. Specifically, Republican and Trump-appointed judges — who are at least a hair more serious about their jobs than Cannon is — ripped Cannon a new one for her moronic order to appoint a special master to sift through all the documents the FBI seized in its lawful search of Mar-a-Lago. This brought the case to a screeching halt, since it meant the DOJ couldn’t use the stolen classified documents the FBI seized to prosecute its case against Trump for stealing classified documents, at least as long as the special master was thumbing through the evidence with his thumbs up his ass.
“This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation,” the judges wrote. “The answer is no.”
PREVIOUSLY AGAIN!
Mueller She Wrote has a good rundown of the specific laws Cannon cited in her dismissal, laws that, despite her misreading of them, do indeed give Attorney General Merrick Garland the authority to appoint special counsels, and fund them. They also have a good summary of Smith’s rebuttals. (“This woman is absolutely full of shit,” Smith did not write.) Joyce White Vance delves into the binding precedent of the Nixon case and all the statutes that uphold the use of special counsels, and why Cannon is such a dunce for thinking binding case law is not binding.
She notes that Smith even cites a 1998 Georgetown Law Journal article written by, ahem, Brett Kavanaugh, which helpfully explains how special counsels work, which strikes us as an elegant touch.
As we said, Smith’s filing is remarkably not personally mean to Cannon. About the meanest he gets — at least to the naked eye — is the penultimate line of the whole thing, which says “Because its premise was wrong, so was its conclusion.” (He’s referring to Cannon’s confusion over which laws govern special counsel funding.) Two sentences before, he had written, “The district court’s contrary conclusion depended solely on its erroneous determination that no ‘other law’ supported the Special Counsel’s appointment.”
Wrong. Nope. Idiot. Bad premise, bad conclusion, bad judge.
We’ll see what happens. Vance notes that this likely won’t get moving until probably early October, with arguments maybe not even until after the new year. But she predicts the 11th Circuit will proooooobably hand Cannon her ass again. God knows what could come after that.
One thing’s for sure: We gotta make sure Donald Trump doesn’t become president in the meantime.
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What pisses me off more than anything is that Trump -- a man who started out by inheriting $400 million, started a bunch of businesses that all failed, then made a reality TV show where he played a businessman on TV, got started in politics by being racist about President Obama, and then when it finally looks like he might be held responsible for a lifetime of mediocrity and crime, the judge and Supreme Court are entirely in the tank for him. The last words that Trump is going to blarp out before he dies (possibly even behind bars) will be "It was so unfair."
This asshole is handed literally every possible advantage in life to the point where he has the Supreme Court saying he can commit all the crimes he wants, and he constantly whines about how everything is so unfair for him. Fuck him, and fuck Cannon.
"One thing’s for sure: We gotta make sure Donald Trump doesn’t become president in the meantime."
Jo
@JoJoFromJerz
I'm pretty sure that if I got fired from my job but refused to leave & then sent a bunch of crazy people to bash in the windows, build a gallows to hang my coworker & smear poop on the walls, and then when I finally did leave, I took a mountain of nuclear secrets with me, refused to give them back, moved them all around my gilded golf motel including into my chandelier shitter & showed them off to my pals all while lying about having them in the first place, I wouldn't be allowed to tour the country saying I was never really fired and that I deserve to get my old job back.
But what do I know.