As Trump’s classified docs prosecution goes forward, now with no pretense of trial before the election, Judge Cannon appears poised to permit him to use public hearings in the case to sound his campaign themes. ...
1/25
... Here, as he did so successfully in Fulton Co., Trump will try to turn the tables, putting prosecutors on trial. Almost all of Trump’s motions (& defenses) reduce to campaign themes: Prosecutorial misconduct and selective & vindictive prosecution orchestrated by Biden. ...
/2
... At first, before Trump sewed up the nomination, he wanted four days of hearings on these themes between July 1 and July 8—the run-up to the July 15 Republican convention. ...
/3
... Now those hearings, whose dates Cannon hasn’t reset yet, will come closer to the election, which should be even better for Trump. He may also have more spaghetti to throw at the wall then, because it appears that Cannon plans ...
/4
... to give him more, & unprecedented, discovery. That’s the import of the extraordinary 3-day hearing she’s set in June on Trump’s motion to redefine the “prosecution team” to include members of Biden White House, NARA, intelligence community, DOD, etc. ...
/5
... The vanishingly thin claims of White House involvement in the prosecution come down to two pieces of non-evidence. One is a malevolent, speculative reading of a NYT article about a different probe that says the opposite of what Trump contends. Specifically ...
/6
... on 4/2/22, NYT said Biden was frustrated with the pace of the AG Garland’s J6 probe but *hadn’t* spoken to the AG about it. Trump hypothesizes that Biden ordered aides to leak this story to NYT to light a fire under AG’s feet. ...
/7 bit.ly/4dryjdv
... Trump’s other smokeless gun is White House dep counsel Jonathan Su’s involvement in Aug-Sept 2021 in NARA’s negotiations with Trump reps over return of presidential docs, like the Kim Jong Un letter, Obama letter, & Hurricane Dorian Sharpie chart...
/8
... Su got involved because a career official in the White House Office of Records Management (“person 40”) had witnessed Trump’s hoarding of presidential documents while Trump was still in the WH & had become concerned even then. ...
/9
... This WH ORM official (person 40) had learned then from Trump’s staff secretary (person 14) that Trump had ~24 bankers boxes of docs that needed to get to NARA. Staff secy joked to person 40: “NARA and what army?” would ever pry those boxes away from Trump. ...
/10
... In August 2021 a Trump rep (Person 27, who seems to be Mark Meadows) suggested a call with the WH ORM official, who was still at WH. WH ORM official wanted WH counsel involved. Su obliged. Both sides saw this as routine & anodyne. ...
/11
... Trump’s selective prosecution claims hinge on childishly strained comparisons between Trump’s conduct & that of other officials: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton—even Deborah Birx! (When Birx politely returned docs to NARA in 2021, one was assessed as classified.)
/12
... Despite lack of evidence, Judge Cannon has shown herself to be highly receptive to themes of both selective prosecution and prosecutorial misconduct. At a March hearing, for instance ...
/13
bit.ly/4clcMCG
... she pressed lawyers on why Trump alone has been charged when other officials have also taken classified docs when their terms ended—unfazed by the singularity in Trump’s having allegedly defied a subpoena & obstructed justice in multiple, elaborate ways. ...
/14
... It was after that hearing that Cannon ordered the parties to draft two possible jury instructions, both of which the govt described as “fundamentally flawed” & “clearly erroneous” & one of which, it said, would “result in directing a verdict against the govt.” ...
/15
... As to prosecutorial misconduct, Cannon has twice, *on her own* ordered attys to explore or report to her on possible govt wrongdoing. E.g., two months after Trump first leveled accusations relating to govt’s alleged intimidation of atty Woodward ...
/16
... Judge Cannon asked the attys, *on her own,* to brief her on the issue under seal. She said she’d read about the claims in “news reports” and had an “independent obligation to protect the integrity of this judicial proceeding.” ...
/17
... At about the same time, Cannon, again *acting on her own,* ordered attorneys to report to her on whether the govt was making abusive use of the DC grand jury to undermine Cannon’s authority in South Florida. ...
/18
... In contrast to Cannon’s solicitousness about possible govt wrongdoing that no party had asked her to look into, she has repeatedly stonewalled allegations of defendants’ sharp practices when they were brought to her attention. ...
/19
... E.g., Woodward’s first unsolicited reference to his disputed 2022 exchange with a DOJ atty actually came in a *reply* brief filed in support of a motion to dismiss he had filed for Nauta that had not originally mentioned the incident at all. ...
/20
bit.ly/3y6d54t
... No litigant is supposed to introduce new claims in a reply brief, because it forces the opponent to move the judge to either strike the new material or permit the filing of a surreply—with the latter approach greatly drawing out the briefing process. ...
/21
... The special counsel has twice complained to Judge Cannon that the defense has raised new issues in reply briefs as an abusive stalling tactic. ...
/22
... On each occasion Cannon winkingly acquiesced in the apparent abuse. Don’t be confused by the words “granting in part” below. She’s granting the govt’s *fallback* remedy—filing a surrebuttal—but refusing to chide the defense for abusive conduct. ...
/23
... We had a starker example back in Nov 2023. Trump asked Cannon to put off the SDFla trial because of the DC trial date, while failing to tell her that, later that same evening, he was filing a motion in DC to stay the DC case entirely. Govt brought it to her attn. ...
/24
... In response, Cannon not only ignored the defense's sharp practice, but warned the govt that she would strike its future notices if it failed to comply with a purported 200-word limit imposed by Local Rules. The govt’s notice had used 217 words. ...
/25
... To get a feel for what it’s been like for the govt to litigate this case before Judge Cannon, see this article on a key issue in the upcoming May 22 hearing on Nauta’s motion to dismiss for selective & vindictive prosecution. ...
/26
bit.ly/3y6d54t
... P.S. This thread has been powered by @lawfare. If you haven’t already, please consider helping @AnnaBower , @TylerMcBrien , Ben Wittes, @qjurecic & me to cover the 4 far-flung Trump prosecutions. Thanks!
/27-endgivebutter.com/c/trumptrials
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