Even as the judgeā€™s latest moves show sheā€™s carefully disguising her advocacy for Trump, he is making it clear that he expects her to save him.

When Judge Aileen CannonĀ handed downĀ her latest ruling in the prosecution of Donald Trump for stealing classified documents, many legal observersĀ immediately understoodĀ the shady gamesmanship lurking behind it. She did, technically, rule against Trump by refusing to dismiss the caseā€”but actually made it easier for herself to kill the case later, or to steer a jury toward an acquittal.

Trumpā€™s lawyers had argued that the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, allowed him to reclassify national security documents as his personal property. Thatā€™s aĀ grotesque misreadingĀ of the lawā€™s history and intent, and Cannon appeared to agree, declaring that the PRA ā€œdoes not provide a pre-trial basis to dismissā€ the case. The media reported this as a partial ā€œwinā€ for special counsel Jack Smithā€™s prosecution team.

But as constitutional scholar Laurence TribeĀ put it, this was a ā€œpretendā€ ruling against Trump that ended up ā€œreservingā€ Cannonā€™s ability to decide the case for Trump in a way that cannot be appealed. In short, Cannon seems to recognize that as she moves toward that endgame, itā€™s essential to maintain plausible deniability throughout.

ā€œJudge Cannon is being canny in her Trump-protective approach,ā€ Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.

  • maculata
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    2 months ago

    Surely nominative determinism means that she will be shot out of, or by a cannon.

    ?