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Judge Cannon’s ‘Mind Boggling’ Move Could Put Witnesses at Risk, Experts Warn

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U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon appears poised to ignore urgent pleadings from Special Counsel Jack Smith, and possibly, experts warn, put confidential witnesses at risk.

Judge Cannon, overseeing the trial of Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents and Espionage Act case, this week ordered the Special Counsel to hand over to Trump’s lawyers the names of witnesses in a previously unknown DOJ investigation into death threats those witnesses allegedly received. She also ordered Smith to hand over to Trump lawyers the contents of those death threats.

Smith quickly moved, urgently asking her to reconsider, noting it was contrary to established procedure and could put lives at risk.

Late Friday afternoon Cannon rejected Smith’s plea, instead ordering him to hand over to Trump’s lawyers the “sealed” information by Saturday, pending what she suggests is further consideration: “The exhibit shall remain sealed pending further Court order.”

READ MORE: Ethics Investigators in Gaetz Underage Sex Allegations Probe Obtain Star Witness Cooperation

MSNBC legal contributor and correspondent Katie Phang posted the order:

Attorney Ben Meiselas, co-founder of the MeidasTouch Network, says Cannon’s Friday afternoon move is “effectively imperiling the safety of witness and intentionally compromising the DOJ investigation!”

On Wednesday, Special Counsel Smith had notified Judge Cannon of his intent to file a motion to reconsider, including sealed information for only her to review.

“The exhibit describes in some detail threats that have been made over social media to a prospective Government witness and the surrounding circumstances, and the fact that those threats are the subject of an ongoing federal investigation being handled by a United States Attorney’s Office. Disclosure of the details and circumstances of the threats risks disrupting the investigation.”

Smith added, “short of sealing the exhibit, e,g., redaction of persons’ names, will not suffice to protect the integrity of the investigation because even with such names redacted, the details of the exhibit could reveal investigative methods, potentially further endanger the victim, and/or provide information to the suspect to which he/she may not otherwise be entitled.”

READ MORE: ‘Burn Book From Mean Girls’: Legal and Political Experts Respond to Hur’s ‘Hit Job’ on Biden

Smith had written that the “discovery material, if publicly docketed in unredacted form as the Court has ordered, would disclose the identities of numerous potential witnesses, along with the substance of the statements they made to the FBI or the grand jury, exposing them to significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment, as has already happened to witnesses, law enforcement agents, judicial officers, and Department of Justice employees whose identities have been disclosed in cases in which defendant Trump is involved,” according to Law & Crime.

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin explains Cannon’s order, directing Smith to hand over the information Trump’s ;lawyers requested, “would, among other things, reveal the names of two dozen people who have participated in the Mar a Lago investigation.”

“If information about an ongoing federal investigation into threats to a prosecution witness is not worthy of an ex parte, under seal filing, I don’t know what is,” Rubin adds. “And the fact that this latest directive forcing disclosure was made in the context of Smith’s motion for Cannon’s reconsideration of two more extensive orders also forcing premature disclosure of investigative details and witness identities is mind boggling.”

 

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Trump White House Turns on ‘Moron’ MAGA Loyalist ‘Begging for an Additional Brain Cell’

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The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.

“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”

“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”

Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”

She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”

On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”

The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.

“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”

In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”

 

 

 

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Veteran Journalist War-Games Trump’s ‘Rolling Coup’ — and How It Fails

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Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

 

Image via Reuters 

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‘Be Very Afraid’: Carville Warns Trump ‘Everybody Is Out for You’

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Political strategist James Carville has a warning for President Donald Trump: be afraid, because everyone is leaking.

Carville responded to a viewer’s remarks about a recent Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan article. The viewer, citing Carville himself, said, “people in the Trump White House are leaking, like, crazy.”

“Don’t trust anybody,” Carville warned. “They got tapes, everybody. They’re — everybody in the administration is s—— all over you, and they’re just getting warmed up.”

“The other effect, come after November, is these people realize that their careers are for all intents and purposes gone,” Carville explained. “No one’s gonna want to hire anybody out of the Trump administration, and the way that you get right with history is start leaking.”

“And you position yourself as the person that tried to tell them,” he warned administration officials. “That’s the only future you have. Leak like a sieve, leak like a broken faucet, leak everywhere.”

“You’re already leaking,” he continued. “Everybody’s leaking on you, everybody’s leaking on everybody else. Trust no one.”

“That’s what, that’s my message to anybody that works in this administration, and if, I’ll give you one piece of advice, Donald Trump, everybody is out for you, even your own people,” Carville said.

“Be scared. Be very afraid.”

It’s unclear which article the viewer was referencing, but Haberman and Swan have a new book about to be released, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Axios earlier this week reported, “Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, ‘Regime Change.'”

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”

Axios also noted that it has heard that “President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Haberman and Swan’s book “reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.”

Among them, that the “top echelon of White House officials was fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” that “Trump wanted revenge against those he felt had wronged him — even when he couldn’t remember their names,” and that “Trump enjoyed comparisons of his power to that of Mao and Genghis Khan.”

Also, the Times noted, one morning White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found Trump with “a tube of super glue in his hand,” as he “was trying to adorn the marble fireplace mantel with new golden decorations.”

Image via Reuters

 

 

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