Judge Cannon Aims Her Gavel At DC
When you've already lit your reputation on fire, what else is there to lose, right?
As of this writing we are still waiting to hear whether Judge Aileen Cannon will kill just Volume 2 of the special counsel’s report, which describes documents case, or whether she’ll go all out and shiv the election interference case report in Volume 1, too.
The signs are ominous. Judge Cannon has no jurisdiction over the matter, having dismissed the case in July after “discovering” that special counsels are illegal — something which escaped the notice of every jurist to examine the issue for five decades. But lack of jurisdiction has never been a barrier for Trump’s pal in Palm Beach. She not only enjoined the release of the entire report, but also reserved three days to take another crack at it after the 11th Circuit issued its ruling.
At 7:39pm on Thursday night, the appeals court denied the motion to issue a similar injunction. But it failed to lay out its reasoning and refused the government’s request to order Cannon to knock it off. Perhaps the three judges, who failed to sign their names, hope that the trial judge will screw around long enough to give Trump the political win he craves without making them get their hands dirty. Nothing kills a Trump SCOTUS nomination faster than following the law! And even if you aren’t angling for a judicial promotion, it’s bad for your health to piss off a president who routinely summons trollstorms against jurists he dislikes and is about to install a madman as head of the FBI. But for whatever reason, the Eleventh Circuit failed to rein Cannon in, and so on Sunday at 5:30pm — i.e. 90 minutes before Cannon’s injunctions was due to expire — a sealed order appeared on the docket. What craziness it contains is anyone’s guess.
But whatever happens, it’s clear that Trump and his cronies seek to leverage the Florida case to undermine the DC one with help from the one judge in the country who might let them get away with it. And not for the first time.
Sock Puppets
Trump’s dipshit henchman Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira were left holding the bag after the election when the DOJ dismissed the Trump prosecutions. But they know that they just have to make it another week and then Trump will drop the appeal and pardon them. Presumably this will be followed by the immediate discovery that special counsels are too legal after all, so Attorney General Pam Bondi can investigate all Trump’s enemies forever.
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