Aileen Cannon
If Judge Aileen Cannon has a superpower, it’s doing a handful of reasonable things at the same time she does something absolutely fuckbonkers, and then convincing the media to treat the whole thing as a wash.
In that vein, Trump’s favorite jurist denied a motion to dismiss the stolen documents case for supposed pleading deficiencies. Or as co-defendant Walt Nauta’s attorney Stan Woodward put it:
The Indictment’s miasma of largely political complaints about how the President disposed of paperwork from his Administration during his term of office, together with the SCO’s argumentative headings (essentially, prejudicial instructions given to the grand jury as to how to interpret the facts), do not meet Rule 7’s requirements. … The SCO’s substitution of this disparagement presentation to a jury leaving jurors to accept argument rather than “essential facts” as the basis of their verdict and turning the Indictment into a form of portable closing argument used to constrain the jury deliberations … is improper under Fed. R. Crim. P. 7.
Counselor Karen indignantly demanded that the court strike much of the indictment, such as “Improper reference to ‘court·authorized search warrant’ creating imprimatur of validity to SCO actions.”
He also wanted to axe paragraphs 33-36 for “Improper inclusion of stories about press interviews and conferences [which] appear designed to prejudice and not to allege any fact of relevance.” Those “stories” detail two episodes which demonstrate that Trump knew perfectly well that the documents in his possession were still classified and had not been magically transubstantiated into personal records by the act of swiping them from the White House.
The first event was recorded by biographers for Mark Meadows, who interviewed the former president at his club in New Jersey on July 21, 2021. Trump waved around a plan to attack Iran, unabashedly admitting that it was “highly confidential.”
“See, as president I could have declassified it,” he vamped. “Now I can’t, you know. But this is still secret.”
The second event, also in New Jersey, involved Trump’s campaign advisor Susie Wiles. As described in the indictment:
In August or September 2021, when he was no longer president, TRUMP met in his office at The Bedminster Club with a representative of his political action committee (the “PAC Representative”). During the meeting, TRUMP commented that an ongoing military operation in Country B was not going well. TRUMP showed the PAC Representative a classified map of Country B and told the PAC Representative that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and to not get too close. The PAC Representative did not have a security clearance or any need-to-know classified information about the military operation.
The New York Times’s Alan Feuer, who recently authored an excellent profile of Judge Cannon which described her as “inexperienced and often insecure,” writes that the dispute over these allegations at the May 22 hearing centered on Rule 404(b), which governs the use of character or “other bad acts” evidence at trial. For reasons unclear, the court seemed to think it was inappropriate to include such evidence in a charging document.
“Do you normally include 404(b) in indictments?” she asked.
When Mr. Bratt said he had included similar evidence in other indictments, Judge Cannon shot back, “Is that proper?”
The court’s bizarre reasoning was similarly on display in her order, in which she grumbled about the impropriety of “speaking indictments,” and opined that “much of the language in the Superseding Indictment is legally unnecessary to serve the function of an indictment[].”
“The Court also notes the risks that can flow from a prosecutor’s decision to include in a charging document an extensive narrative account of his or her view of the facts, especially in cases of significant public interest,” she huffed, adding that she’d be denying most of the requested strikes “given the rigorous standard for applying Rule 7(d) … because Defendants have not clearly shown that the challenged allegations are flatly irrelevant or prejudicial.”
But the second New Jersey oopsie described in paragraph 36, the one involving Susie Wiles, is out, supposedly because of FRCrP7(d) which allows for striking of “surplusage.”
“The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure contemplate a specific procedure governing attempts to introduce evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts. Fed. R. Crim. P. 404(b),” she wrote. “Pre-trial notice must be given with supporting reasons justifying a permissible non-propensity use for the allegations. Id. Motions practice follows, with an opportunity for defendants to respond to the request as a matter of Rule 404(b), Rule 403, and standard evidentiary requirements.”
Presumably she means Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), not Criminal Procedure, although the confusion is forgivable since this is not an evidentiary motion. And indeed the judge goes to great pains to say that she’s not making an evidentiary ruling on the admissibility of Wiles’s testimony. But her evident hostility to the inclusion of some of the best evidence that Trump knew the documents were still classified is a flashing red light that Judge Canon will exclude a lot of the evidence at trial.
But because she rejected the motion to dismiss and strike the rest of the indictment, it’s being reported as no big deal. It’s a rare gift!
US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]
#Judge #Cannon #Takes #Sharpie #Trump #Docs #Indictment
