“The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to ‘avoid protracted litigation,'” The New Republic reports.
News
‘Bizarre’ Order Warrants Judge Cannon’s Removal: Experts
Legal experts are urging Special Counsel Jack Smith to file for the removal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, calling her recent order in the Trump Espionage Act/classified documents case “bizarre,” “legal inanity,” and saying it is an inaccurate interpretation of the law.
Judge Cannon “issued an unusual order late Monday regarding jury instructions at the end of the trial — even though she has not yet ruled on when the trial will be held, or a host of other issues,” The Washington Post reports. The paper adds that she “instructed lawyers to file proposed jury instructions by April 2 on two topics that are related to defense motions to have the indictment dismissed outright.”
Calling her order an “ultimatum,” The Daily Beast‘s Jose Pagliery explains, “as she has done repeatedly, Cannon used this otherwise innocuous legal step as yet another way to swing the case wildly in favor of the man who appointed her while he was president.”
“Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith must now choose whether to allow jurors at the upcoming criminal trial to peruse the many classified records found at the former president’s South Florida mansion or give jurors instructions that would effectively order them to acquit him.”
READ MORE: ‘Antisemitic’: Trump Blasted for Attack on Jewish Democrats
“Alternatively, Smith could appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, where more experienced judges have already overturned Cannon and reined her in. But doing that will only further delay a trial that’s at least three months behind schedule, entirely by the judge’s own design,” The Daily Beast adds.
Diving a bit further into Cannon’s order, Pagliery adds: “Cannon’s evening order alerted federal prosecutors and Trump’s legal team that they ‘must engage with the following competing scenarios’ when considering whether Trump can be charged with ‘unauthorized possession’: Either ‘a jury is permitted to examine’ every record a former president swipes and claims as ‘personal’ to determine whether it is, or jurors must be told that ‘a president has sole authority… to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency.'”
Some in the legal community are vociferously denouncing Judge Cannon’s order.
Professor of law and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, usually reserved in her commentary, called Cannon’s order “two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act.”
She writes that each of Cannon’s “two ‘legal scenarios’ … seems to assume that the Presidential Records Act gives Trump the ability to morph national secrets into personal papers.”
READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis
“Her two scenarios involve two different ways the Presidential Records Act could help Trump out, but they’re both wrong,” Vance says, noting that “Judge Cannon misses the fact that these items were government property, not Trump’s personal possessions.”
Attorney George Conway, who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and received a unanimous ruling, called Cannon’s order, “the most bizarre order I’ve ever seen issued by a federal judge. What makes that all the more amazing is that the second and third most bizarre orders I’ve ever seen in federal court were also issued by Judge Cannon in this case.”
He later called for Cannon’s removal:
“Okay, I’ve seen enough. Not only should Aileen Cannon not be sitting on this case, but she should not be sitting on the federal bench at all. This is utterly nuts.”
Professor of law and former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann says Cannon’s order should be the last straw:
“This is the kind of legal inanity that could lead Jack Smith to seek to mandamus Judge Cannon- ie to get the 11th Circuit appeals court to hear this and reverse her for the third time- which could also be the proverbial three strikes and you’re out.”
Harvard University Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe, a top constitutional law scholar, agreed, responding to Weissmann: “This is outrageous. It’s what the writ of mandamus is there for.”
Minutes later, Tribe also wrote: “OMG! Judge Cannon clearly cannot be permitted to preside over this case. Whether she should be removed from the federal judiciary altogether is another matter. She probably should. Her ruling makes utter nonsense of the Presidential Records Act.”
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CNN legal analyst and former U.S. Ambassador Norm Eisen, who served as the House Judiciary Committee’s co-counsel during the first trump impeachment, served up an analysis of Cannon’s order.
“Cannon seems inclined to push the case to trial but is basically asking if she can stack the deck so Trump wins,” he writes.
And he says the Special Counsel can use this to have her removed:
“If she persists in this course, special counsel Jack Smith can & will go to the 11th Circuit And while he is there, this & several other recent (threatened) blunders give him ammo to have her reversed & removed.”
Former federal prosecutor Alan Lieberman declares: “Smith must petition the 11th Circuit to remove her.”
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President Donald Trump is now in “discussions” with his own government to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, a federal agency he exercises limited influence over, after a contractor released 15 years of his tax returns in 2019, which were published by The New York Times two months before the 2020 election.
“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued, TNR notes. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”
TNR also repots that legal experts “have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.”
Critics allege a conflict of interest in the case.
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“Right out in the open, Donald Trump is suing his own IRS to try to steal $10 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” charged U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who notes she has introduced legislation to prevent “this theft.”
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan described the situation as Trump “Negotiating with himself to loot the US Treasury.”
“Nothing beats reaching into the taxpayers’ pocket and helping oneself to $10 billion,” wrote Richard Field, the Director of the Institute for Financial Transparency.
“Trump is suing the federal government and cashing in. Who approves these settlements? HE DOES of course. There is no bottom to his shamelessness. Meanwhile American families suffer,” wrote U.S. Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL).
“Trump is just stealing $10 billion from taxpayers! That’s very MAGA,” charged Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
MAGA has made a deal with Donald Trump, and the deal is that “the humiliation is the point,” argues Republican former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger. In short, he says, “humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump.”
Kinzinger, a never-Trump Republican who acknowledged last year that his politics are now probably closer to the Democrats, says that to “understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.”
He walks through a timeline of humiliations.
Trump asked MAGA to believe the 2020 election was stolen, so they did, “including many who knew better.”
Trump asked MAGA to excuse the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a mere tourist visit, and they did.
“He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image,” he writes. “Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
Kinzinger reveals the psychology of what he believes is actually happening here.
“Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.”
What does this mean for the future?
“Don’t expect a wholesale collapse in Trump’s support,” he predicts. “Some will leave, others have tied their conscience to his success. Those will double down, again and again.”
Kinzinger expects that MAGA is not breaking apart. “I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works,” he writes. Because Trump has trained his movement to accept humiliation as “proof of loyalty.”
“The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become,” he explains, “because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.”
But, he says, “the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t.”
“Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving. We’re not there yet,” he explains. “But we’re closer than Trump wants you to think.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo. Those spheres of control and influence are “aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”
Posner writes that the “goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
She posits that during Trump’s second term, the White House and federal agencies “have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies.”
On Easter Sunday, several administration agencies posted social media messages “heralding Christ’s resurrection,” the Associated Press reported.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”
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“He is risen,” was the message from both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The Department of Justice went even further.
“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department —- is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the message read.
Posner argues how various administration officials use religion.
JD Vance “starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war).”
Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Secretary Hegseth “aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer “has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon.”
“All these moves,” Posner writes, “are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
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