Well, federal Judge Aileen Cannon is still at it.
Cannon, originally nominated for the federal judiciary by Donald Trump himself when he was still in office as president, has faced criticism throughout her involvement in Trump-related proceedings for argued benefits she’s provided the former president. She’s now handling the federal criminal case accusing Trump of the mishandling of sensitive government records, and much to prosecutors’ frustration, she’s keeping alive — for now — in the context of prospective jury instructions an idea that the federal Presidential Records Act (PRA) could help Trump out legally. She reiterated her refusal to shut down the idea yet in Thursday writings.
“In the docs case, Smith’s best bet is still to move to recuse/disqualify Judge Cannon. Now at least, Cannon’s long record of acts and failures to act can be cited to show her conduct is so out of line that her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,”” Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor, argued this week on X, the social platform formerly called Twitter.
Cannon herself acknowledged the prospect of appeals in the Thursday decision in which she rebuffed entreaties by Special Counsel Jack Smith for moving more decisively on the question of what legal interpretations to use for jury instructions. She asked specifically for hypothetical jury instructions resting on a pair of (related) legal interpretations allowing broad leeway for a designation of disputed documents as “personal” rather than presidential, though prosecutors say that key questions in the case aren’t about that at all.
One of the methods by which the hypothetical scenarios get to that “personal” designation is extreme, treating it as almost automatic. It’s the idea that “a President has carte blanche to remove any document from the White House at the end of his presidency; that any document so removed must be treated as a personal record under the PRA as an unreviewable matter of law,” prosecutors summarized in their filings.
