The following is an edited excerpt from the Nov. 7 episode of MSNBC’s podcast “Prosecuting Donald Trump.”
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team went this week to Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the Florida classified documents case, and said to her, in effect, “Put this trial off because it’s going to conflict with the March trial in D.C., which is going to take a while.” And the judge said, “OK, I see your point” and seemed to indicate a favorable hearing, although she didn’t rule.
The very next morning, Trump files in his election interference case in D.C., saying, “Put this trial off.” But he hadn’t told Judge Cannon the day earlier that he was planning to make this motion in his other case. So, correctly, special counsel Jack Smith makes a filing in Florida that says, “By the way, we are alerting you, Judge Cannon, to what just happened before Judge Chutkan in D.C.”
When I was practicing, whether as a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, a judge would have had my head if I had tried what Trump did. You’ve got to tell judges what you’re doing. We did that over and over again in the Manafort case, where we had two judges, one in Virginia, one in D.C. We were constantly informing them both as an obligation and as a courtesy. Now, they might have been following the news anyway, but we had an obligation to inform them. Do you know how many times we were chastised for that? Zero — because we were doing our obligation to the court.
But instead of Cannon being upset at Trump’s attorneys for the gamesmanship, she issued an order chastising the special counsel, saying in effect, “You, Jack Smith, made the filing improperly because you’re trying to treat this like a sur-reply. And in the future, they’re going to be bounced.”
After the 11th Circuit reversed Cannon twice in very scathing language, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt when the criminal case was brought. But now I’m done. I don’t know whether it’s bias or inexperience or, as I suspect, it’s both, but I’m done. It is wholly inappropriate to have somebody with that combination of bias and inexperience handling a case like this, and it’s so inappropriate that this was her response.
This was a test of her integrity to see whether she is capable of telling the defense, “What you did was improper, and don’t let that happen again.” Instead, she penalized the government for notifying her of the shenanigans. This is a federal judge, and that is not how a federal judge should behave.
It is impossible for me not to view this as part and parcel of her horrendous pretrial record. I am absolutely done.
