Donald Trump took classified documents with him after he left the White House, refused to give them back and after two-plus years of lying about what he possessed – military secrets, including battle plans and the details of certain “nuclear programs” – a grand jury finally indicted him last June.
The classified documents case could have been history by now. With the facts already made public, including Trump on tape talking about a document he should not have possessed with people who should not have been told about it, it is likely the once-and-future Republican nominee would already have been the first former president ever convicted of a crime after leaving office.
“This case could and should have been ready for trial in December [2023] or January,” according to Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney. But Trump was fortunate: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon won the lottery to hear the case, making an appointee of the defendant the one to decide if or when the case goes before jurors.
Last week, Cannon formally decided that Trump’s trial will be held maybe never: She threw out the May 20 start date that at least existed on paper, saying it would be “imprudent” to set another time, for now. The reason, Cannon said, is that she there are still “myriad and interconnected” issues that the judge herself must rule on.
In other words: the trial cannot begin because Cannon has not finished the work that she imposed on herself – on questions raised by the Trump defense team that, per Vance, would be “routinely denied” hearings by anyone else.
As Vance noted in a post on her website, the trial could have been held already had Cannon “been working on the motions and [setting] realistic deadlines all along.” Instead, she has given Trump “what he wanted all along,” which is perpetual delay, potentially pushing a trial back to 2025 at the earliest, when a Trump-led Department of Justice could kill it off altogether.
“She has made bad decisions that have no relationship to what the law is in this case,” former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks said in an interview on MSNBC over the weekend. “She has refused to make decisions that should have been made months ago."
Instead of a trial, Cannon will be using the next month to hold hearings on motions that most legal experts say would not get a hearing in almost any other federal court, including the defense’s claim that it should receive discovery material not just from prosecutors, but potentially the White House, part of its claim that Trump is being persecuted by President Joe Biden; that issue alone will be discussed for three days in June.
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Cannon has also repeatedly pushed back deadlines of her own making, recently giving Trump’s legal team more time to say what classified information it intends to present at trial. That is truly a complex issue, governed by the Classified Information Procedures Act, that will ultimately require Cannon to decide what redactions are permissible – that is, it’s an issue that most judges would have tried to resolve last year.
“She is not dumb,” Wine-Banks said, “but she is really not doing her job.”
Or, as others see it, Cannon is indeed doing exactly what is expected of her.
“When people say the fight is fixed, this is the type of stuff they are talking about,” former Justice Department spokesperson Anthony Coley said on MSNBC. “You have a woman here who intentionally appears to be dragging her feet,” he observed, arguing Cannon is less an objective judge and more someone who appears to be “a MAGA activist in a black robe.”
It’s not just liberals on MSNBC who see Cannon as hopelessly biased against special counsel Jack Smith.
“My favorite member of the Trump campaign,” an ally of the former president joked to Rolling Stone; “a godsend,” said another.
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