Latest Stupid Thing To Happen In Aileen Cannon’s Courtroom Real Damn Stupid
Latest Stupid Thing To Happen In Aileen Cannon’s Courtroom Real Damn Stupid
Trump's stolen docs trial still scheduled for 'never.'
Again we pivot from closing arguments in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, down to south Florida, for an update on the case of Trump’s stolen state secrets. That case, of course, will never actually go to trial, because Judge Aileen Cannon thinks she’s part of Trump’s defense team, and appears to be angling for a Supreme Court appointment, or at least a certificate for a free soft-serve ice cream (one scoop only!) at Mar-a-Lago Sunday brunch.
Judge Cannon has denied without prejudice a motion from Special Counsel Jack Smith to amend the terms of Trump’s release to shove a gag order down his throat to prevent him from lying and saying the Biden administration tried to murder him, thereby endangering the federal personnel who lawfully and correctly conducted the search of Mar-a-Lago.
Cannon denied the motion because Smith’s lawyers didn’t discuss it adequately/nicely with Trump’s lawyers before filing it — this is called “conferral” — therefore she found Smith’s motion “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.”
Tut-tut and tsk-tsk, indeed!
“It should go without saying that meaningful conferral is not a perfunctory exercise. Sufficient time needs to be … “
Blah blah blah blah blah, and so on and so forth. She even threatened sanctions against Smith, just like Trump’s team asked.
So listen, class? This is some dumb shit.
Again, the motion here from Smith was to prevent Trump from endangering federal officials by repeating the wholly disproven lie that the Biden administration had tried to have the FBI assassinate him.
Trump has been telling this lie because his voters are too stupid to understand when he’s lying to them, and too ignorant of the world around them to grasp that the FBI followed its standard protocol — at Mar-a-Lago and also when it searched Joe Biden’s Delaware house — which includes boilerplate language about when and how it’s permissible to use deadly force if things somehow go awry.
But Cannon cannot be bothered to rule on the substance here, at least not until Jack Smith jumps through one million hoops to prove he has carefully conferred with Trump’s team to see if they can come to some sort of agreement on the matter. Not that any kind of careful conferring would produce anything of the sort, as one of Smith’s lawyers pointed out in an email to Trump lawyer Todd Blanche on Friday, which handily lays out exactly what they’re arguing about here:
The former President issued a statement on Truth Social on May 21, 2024 containing the false accusations and a second one on May 23. He also included similar statements in a mass fundraising email on May 21 and in a second one on May 23. In light of your client’s prior opposition in other cases to any limitation on what he can say - based on the same putative First Amendment implications you mention in your response below - we do not believe that further conferral would be productive or have any reasonable chance of resulting in your concurrence in our motion. Even were the situation otherwise, waiting until Monday afternoon to speak is unreasonable. As recently as this afternoon, Mr. Trump reposted a statement on Truth Social again making the false accusations and adding new ones. Further conferral will be a fruitless exercise and does nothing to mitigate the danger your client is creating. We will include in our motion that you do not believe we provided you an opportunity for meaningful conferral.
To really understand this fight, click here and read the entire tranche of emails between the two sides on Friday afternoon.
Because Cannon has not ruled on the substance, this isn’t appealable, according to the legal experts of legal Twitter. Smith can try to fix it and refile, i.e. waste his time trying to do more conferrals with Trump’s idiot lawyers, which will not amount to shit.
How many more times will Trump feel like endangering FBI personnel’s lives in the meantime, by telling that lie? Who knows! Clearly not Cannon’s concern.
Now, if you could please stop bothering her, she is busy carving “AC + DT 4ever” into her gavel, and after that she’s prepared a clean sheet of loose leaf from her Trapper Keeper to play M.A.S.H.
GO. AWAY.
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
@evanjosephhurst on Threads!
I have profiles those other places but I think I forgot how to log on.
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The Legal Realm: Where reality and common sense absolutely go to fucking die.
Hmmm. This has less of the feel of Judge Aileen being crooked, and more the feel of her simply not understanding the legal principles involved and focusing instead on the details that she does understand. Maybe it's both. Lord knows she's behaved in very corrupt ways already.
Score another victory for the right-wing project to (mis)educate a generation of lawyers on "conservative principles" and then use political power to advance those most committed to that conservative understanding of the law. It's terrifying that many Democrats still fail to equate voting for president with who's going to be on the Supreme Court.