So wise!
The post Judge Cannon Exercises Restraint By Slicing Special Counsel Baby In Half appeared first on Above the Law.
Aileen Cannon
Judge Aileen Cannon woke up this morning and decided that she’d be only half lawless. Which is an improvement on her prior batting average! Instead of telling the DOJ it can’t publish the entire special counsel report on the Trump investigations, she only purports to control half of it.
See, what were you libs whining about? It’s just a federal district judge policing the interactions between the executive and legislative branches, no biggie!
Judge Cannon was confirmed to the Southern District of Florida after Trump lost the 2020 election, and she rose to prominence by inventing jurisdiction to allow Trump to challenge the sufficiency of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. When the case was eventually assigned to her, she spent a year abusing the special counsel and then dismissed it after discovering that special counsels were illegal.
That dismissal is on appeal to the 11th Circuit, but the DOJ dropped the charges against Trump when he won the election in 2024, leaving his henchmen Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira holding the bag. The pendency of the appeal gave the dipshit henchmen a hook to challenge the report, which they did in Judge Cannon’s courtroom natch, as well as at the 11th Circuit.
Without holding a hearing, soliciting a response from the government, or even going through the four-factor test for injunctive relief, Judge Cannon enjoined the government distributing the report. And to top it off, she reserved three days after the 11th Circuit weighed in to take another crack at it.
The DOJ informed both the trial judge and the appellate panel that the report was divided into two volumes: Volume 1, which deals with the election interference case in DC; and Volume 2, which deals with the stolen documents case in Florida dismissed by Cannon. Volume 1 was intended for public release, and Volume 2 reserved for in camera review by the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary Committee during the pendency of the criminal case.
On Thursday night, the 11th Circuit denied the henchmen’s motion for an injunction, but refused the DOJ’s request to order Judge Cannon to knock it off. Instead the unnamed panel instructed the government to appeal her ruling, which they did.
The henchmen have taken multiple bizarre — not to say dubiously legal — positions in these proceedings. In their first motion, they stated as fact that AG Garland would release the entire special counsel report publicly, violating their due process rights, by poisoning the jury pool, and also the Presidential Transition Act and the Executive Vesting Clause.
After the DOJ informed the courts that it only intended to release Volume 1 to the public, the henchmen switched tactics. They adamantly insisted that they were mentioned in Volume 1, and they argued that their cases would be damaged by congressional leaks if Volume 2 were shared with anyone outside the DOJ.
When the DOJ responded with evidence that the henchmen were not mentioned at all in Volume 1, they pivoted again in their reply brief. This time they argued that dirtying up Trump, by reminding Americans of that time he tried to overthrow the government, was unfair to his prior co-conspirators: “The protective order principle applies fully where the government seeks to ‘try’ in a court of public opinion a figure it identified as a co-conspirator in this case.”
And, uhhh, what if the attorneys reviewing the report are too green to appreciate that, if you read between the lines, the election interference case is actually all about Trump’s body man shifting boxes into and out of the storage locker in Mar-a-Lago and trying to delete the security camera footage after it got subpoenaed?
The attorneys asserting no connection do not know the significance of certain matters addressed in the Report; they do not adequately understand the connections between the two cases and their respective investigations; they do not have a well-versed understanding of the evidence and the potential witnesses. There is anticipated to be overlap between the witnesses used in the respective cases. The facts and circumstances of the respective cases are inextricably intertwined insofar as the conduct targeted in both investigations was occurring around the same time.
This morning, with her three-day stay set to expire, Judge Cannon issued her ruling. Even she had to admit Trump’s cronies hadn’t come up with a single marginally pretextual reason to bottle up Volume 1. But she insists that Volume 2 “presents contested factual and legal issues that must be resolved in an orderly, expedited basis, following full briefing and a hearing,” which she scheduled for this Friday.
That is, in effect, an order quashing the release of report to Congress, since Trump will be sworn in on Monday, and he will instruct the DOJ to burn the thing. Indeed, he’s already weighed in with amicus briefs at both the District and Circuit courts claiming that the reports are illegal political interference. As has Jeff “the Oil Spill” Clark who busted in last night demanding that Judge Cannon enjoin the release of the election interference report because it might prejudice him.
It’s also a constitutional crisis to have a wacked out trial judge in Florida telling the AG that he can’t share the conclusions of a vital national security investigation with Congress. Particularly since that report documents the behavior of multiple Trump administration nominees, including Kash Patel, his pick to lead the FBI. When Patel was working at the Epoch Times, a Chinese ex-pat money laundering operation attached to a rightwing media company, he publicly claimed to have seen Trump declassify the documents at issue. But he took the Fifth before the grand jury investigating this case, and was eventually immunized and forced to testify by Judge Beryl Howell. His conduct here is certainly germane to the confirmation battle, and Congress has a right to see it.
The 11th Circuit has shown no inclination to rouse itself for this task. But maybe Trump — whoops, I mean Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — would like to take one more flyer at SCOTUS to see if they can’t peel Justice Barrett off to block release of Volume 1.
US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]
US v. Trump [11th Circuit Docket via Court Listener]
