Jack Smith may have laid the groundwork for getting Aileen Cannon out of Trump’s classified documents case in a new court filing.
What did Jack Smith argue in a new paper?
Smith’s team wrote in its filing that Judge Cannon made a clear mistake by refusing to protect witnesses in the classified documents case:
Reconsideration is needed to correct obvious errors and prevent manifest injustice. As explained below, the Court applied the wrong legal standard and issued orders that will, in practice, expose witnesses and others to intolerable and unnecessary risk. Before addressing these questions, however, the Government responds to the defendants’ procedural objection, see above n.1. Although the Government understands that motions for reconsideration should not be used to present new evidence or arguments, Grobman, 548 F. Supp. 3d at 1348, a reconsideration is in order here given the context in which this discovery controversy arose.
The defendants here were not legally entitled to a list of government witnesses, or to their grand jury statements or transcripts, before trial.
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Why might Aileen Cannon be removed from the Trump classified documents case?
Norm Eisen, a legal expert and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes this could be the third shot that gets Judge Cannon out of the case.
There’s a lot of news, but something IMPORTANT happened last night. Smith filed a motion with Judge Cannon to reconsider the order unsealing the names and names of certain witnesses in the MAL documents case. This could be the start of Cannon’s expulsion from the case under the 11 Cir bias rules.
Cannon already has two strikes against her since she oversaw the investigation into the documents. Before her the 11th Cir preliminarily canceled a suspension she imposed And then they permanently canceled her outrageous appointment of a special master This latest order could be strike three…
Why? First of all, reconsideration is an “extraordinary remedy that should be employed sparingly” to “correct CLEAR MISTAKE and PREVENT MANIFEST INJUSTICE.” So the fact that Smith made this motion shows how wrong Smith thinks Cannon was and how dangerous she thought her order was.
Cannon is a Trump-appointed judge who has had his qualifications and potential bias against the former president questioned in this case. Smith appears to be laying the groundwork for another attack on Cannon by the appeals court, and if that happens, it could finally be the end of Trump’s favorite judge handling the classified documents case.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a member of the White House press pool and a congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a bachelor’s degree in political science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and professional memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association