Because of Cannon’s slow pace
The sweep of Cannon’s decision was a surprise at the Justice Department. The outcome was not. Jack Smith’s team saw the Trump documents case as essentially stalled out for months because of Cannon’s slow pace and had more or less written off the possibility of a trial this year.
That’s probably because the Justice Department and Jack Smith are aware that Cannon is a freakishly underqualified judge appointed by the freakishly underqualified Trump to serve Trump’s interests as he tries to get away with anything and everything.
Even before her bombshell decision on Monday to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, Judge Aileen M. Cannon has made any number of unorthodox rulings.
Since taking control of the case last June, in fact, many of her decisions have been so outside the norm that they have come to seem like business as usual.
Still, almost no one — including some defense lawyers working on the case — expected Judge Cannon to kill the documents case by ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job. And her timing could not have been more shocking, delivering Mr. Trump a major legal victory on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, where he will soon be formally named as his party’s nominee for president.
I suppose the point is to rub our noses in it. “Haha we can do anything we want and you can’t do jackshit about it.”
Many legal experts questioned her decision to hold a hearing last month on the question of Mr. Smith’s appointment, arguing that several courts reaching back to the Watergate era had already upheld the legality of independent prosecutors. The hearing was even odder, the experts pointed out, because Judge Cannon allowed outside parties who had filed friend-of-the-court briefs to address her directly for up to 30 minutes — a practice that rarely takes place at the trial level and is more common in appellate-level courts like the Supreme Court.
So she likes to have a little fun at our expense, is that so wrong?
A pet peeve of mine around reporting on Trump is the perpetual reporting of shock that they flouted some norm or other. It’s more than a pet peeve, actually. It infuriates me. That’s what sociopathic criminals DO. If it’s not guaranteed that you will be immediately imprisoned for doing something, and there’s an advantage to doing it, THEY WILL DO IT.
I used to bicker with my mother about it. She was one of those 24-hour CNN/MSNBC watchers, with one or the other channel on in the background all day. Practically once a week during the entire Trump presidency (and the electoral campaign that preceded his presidency), she’d call me in a state of absolute shock that Trump’s people did something or other that was unthinkable. It got to the point where I kept telling her, clearly it’s not unthinkable if it keeps happening over and over and over and over again. Business as usual shouldn’t be so shocking, even when it’s… well, shocking.
But I understood where she was coming from. It’s hard for it not to remain shocking, even though he does it over and over and over again. But if we want to stop it from continuing to happen, we need to at least prepare for it, to expect the shocking behaviour to happen. We can’t keep hoping and praying for the best. The benefit of the doubt is a losing bet. Stop betting on it.
That’s the problem with sociopathic criminals and criminal institutions (like the Trump machine): their advantage is that we can’t help but constantly give them the benefit of the doubt, to treat them as though they’re capable of remorse, as though if we keep modelling to them how noble it is to work within the norms of the system, that they’ll eventually pick up the habit and start playing nice. They won’t. Ever.
Trump and his machine are beyond reason. That’s why they’re so dangerous.
The days of Hitler’s ascendancy through the German system keep flooding my mind.
I kind of suspect that Cannon did this just as much to get this case off her docket as to help out Trump (though I’m sure that’s part of the motivation, too).
If she only cared about helping Trump, she could have set an early trial date, and dismissed once the trial began and double jeopardy was attached, making the dismissal appeal-proof. But that would have required her to deal with all of the pretrial motions and classified documents procedures efficiently and competently.
This way, the dismissal can be appealed, but in the meantime she’s spared all of that. She’s not going to be in the news constantly, and doesn’t have to deal with all the attention and workload of this case.
The 11th Circuit probably isn’t going to rule on this until well after the election. If Trump wins, then it’s all moot because he’ll order DOJ to drop the appeal. If Trump loses, well, by the time all the appeals are exhausted, if DOJ prevails, either the case gets remanded to her or sent to a different judge. If she gets it, she’ll just grant a motion to dismiss on immunity grounds and that will set off a whole new round of appeals, which will continue until Trump is dead and the case is moot.