Donald Trump is trying to rush to the defense of federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who he himself originally nominated for the federal judiciary when still in office as president and who is now presiding over a federal criminal case facing Trump over his handling of government documents from his time in office.
“Crooked Joe Biden and his crew of Hacks and Thugs, led by Merrick Garland and Deranged Jack Smith, are working overtime to try to illegally intimidate and harass respected Federal Judge Aileen Cannon,” Trump posted, falsely crediting the current president with the handling of prosecution. “They are calling her terrible names, wrongfully threatening her with Impeachment, and disrespecting her, all because they want her to act like the dishonest, politically biased, and conflicted Judges in New York, and not like the fair and impartial Judge that she is.”
Needless to say, there is no substantive evidence proving some kind of intention among federal prosecutors to get Cannon to behave more politically.
A key difference between Cannon’s handling of Trump’s case and other judicial actions about which the former president is so furious is that many argue that Cannon is acting in a way specifically beneficial to Trump, at least in large part. It mirrors her earlier agreement to set up an additional level of delay-forcing review after federal investigators seized documents from Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago, extra review eventually shut down by a higher-level court as authorities warned of delays and pointed to their review processes already in place around the document seizure.
Trump’s rant got… stranger. “Smith will never be Coach Bobby Knight, a Basketball Legend for all time, who led the last undefeated team in College Basketball. Coach Knight would always “play the refs,” but not to change the last call, to change the next one,” Trump added, as though the two subjects have anything reasonable to do with each other.
