It’s still hard for me to believe that Judge Aileen Cannon had the unprecedented chutzpah to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case against Donald Trump. She should be impeached. It’s beyond outrageous. David Kurtz at TPM:
The timing was breathtaking.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s wholesale dismissal in July of the indictment of Donald Trump for hoarding national security information at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing efforts to retrieve the materials came on the Monday following the Saturday assassination attempt against the former president.
That Monday was also the first day of the GOP convention and the day that Trump announced JD Vance as his running mate.
You could be excused if you missed the Mar-a-Lago news that day.
Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed his appeal brief with 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to have Cannon’s dismissal reversed. It is an airtight case for why his own appointment as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the funding for his work were both lawful. It is also an understated but withering deconstruction of Cannon’s deeply flawed decision. The only real bit of news was what the brief didn’t contain: an explicit request that the appeals court remove Cannon from the case.
It is highly likely that Smith prevails at the appeals court, but that victory will not mask the fundamental systemic and institutional failures to hold Trump to account under the rule of law for his crimes in a timely way that halts Trump’s ongoing threat to national security, gives voters a clear picture of who they’re voting for in November, and bolsters public confidence in the ability of the judicial branch to properly function in a crisis.
It’s easy to blame Judge Cannon for this debacle, and she deserves all the scorn heaped on her, but no one judge should be able to wreak this much havoc in such an important case without recourse or accountability. While we properly vest considerable power in individual federal judges, the system has shown its limitations, weaknesses, and ineptitude when confronted with a case of this magnitude.
Looming over these failures is the prospect of Trump winning back the White House then ordering the Justice Department to dismisses the case against him, and as I’ve suggested before, abusing the powers of the presidency to hamstring the judicial branch in various other ways that will sideline it to his autocratic impulses, especially now that the Supreme Court has sanctified him with presidential immunity. To put it more simply, Trump represents an existential threat to the judiciary, too, though it collectively doesn’t seem to grasp the risk.
This is such an excellent point. The judiciary seems to think they’ve got immunity from Trump’s fascism.
Not bloody likely.
As long as they act like his personal lackeys, as Cannon has done here, maybe. But that’s no guarantee as many of Trump’s erstwhile allies have found. One wrong word and Trump will make an example of you, just to show he can.
Maybe the six right wing Supremes like the idea of being Trump’s personal bitches, I don’t know. But if he is elected again I hope they understand that that’s what they’re going to be.
And yes, like so much else in our system of government Trump has found all the weaknesses that required that our institutions be run by people with at least a modicum of integrity.