Judge #AileenCannon said Thurs that she will hold a hearing for #Trump’s lawyers to challenge some of the #evidence gathered against him for alleged mishandling of #ClassifiedDocuments & #obstruction of government efforts to retrieve them.
In an 11-page order, the judge said that “further factual development is warranted” when it comes to Trump’s challenge to the #SearchWarrant for #MarALago.
#FBI agents searched #MarALago on Aug 8, 2022, finding 103 #ClassifiedDocuments that eventually led to his #indictment. #Trump is seeking to suppress much of that #evidence by arguing that the #SearchWarrant was faulty. #AileenCannon also said Trump’s defense lawyers were #entitled to a hearing on whether prosecutors had misused statements by one of Trump’s fmr lawyers.
Cannon said she would shortly issue a separate order on when she will hear those issues in court.
"Another trove of photographs, which were taken by the FBI during that 2022 search, have been made public as part of a new filing by Smith (all photographs in this post come from the CBS article on these developments in the case). These photos speak volumes about how Trump saw his power and role as president.
Authoritarian leaders have an entirely proprietary view of governance.
"They don't recognize boundaries between public and private. They believe that as head of state it is their right to possess and exploit for personal benefit anything in the nation, from natural resources to economic assets to information.
A sense of chaos and total disregard for national security pervade the storage room, shown below in another view."
"The U.S. presidency was always just a means to an end for Trump, who had autocratic, not democratic, goals for his time in the White House. Turning public office into a vehicle for private enrichment and making deals with others of his tribe were top priorities. 'Dictators? It's OK. Come on in. Whatever's good for America,' Trump declared in 2019, his intended audience of foreign autocrats likely getting the message."
Judge #AileenCannon is skeptical that #evidence from #MarALago should be thrown out – she was not receptive to the defense’s complaints about the 2022 search of #Trump’s home.
Her skepticism toward defense was unusual, as a Trump appointee who has issued many favorable rulings toward Trump & has often clashed w/special counsel #JackSmith’s team…
"The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump's classified documents case will hear arguments Friday about whether special counsel Jack Smith should be removed from the prosecution."
Shortly after #AileenCannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee #Trump’s classified documents case, 2 more experienced #Florida#judges on the federal bench urged her to pass it up & hand it off to another jurist.
#AileenCannon has broken, acc/to lawyers who operate there, w/a general practice of federal #judges in the Southern District of #Florida of delegating some pretrial motions to a magistrate — in this instance, Judge #BruceReinhart. While he is [technically] subordinate to her, Judge Reinhart is an older & much more experienced jurist. In 2022, he was the one who signed off on an #FBI#warrant to search #Trump’s #MarALago …for highly sensitive govt files that Trump kept after leaving office.
"Legal experts pan Aileen Cannon's 'outrageous' pro-Trump bias. Judge Cannon has appeared confused by basic legal concepts and indulged the Trump defense team's wildest arguments."
🤦🏻♀️😳#Trump & #Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the Tesla leader should TFG reclaim WH, the latest sign that the once-frosty relationship between the 2 has thawed.
The role hasn’t been fully hammered out and might not happen, but they discussed ways to give Musk formal input & influence over policies related to border security and the economy, both issues on which Musk has grown more vocal. https://apple.news/A12U7FLPbQbm6Nfj7Y1_glQ
In an angry court filing, #Trump’s lawyers pushed back hard against the request by the office of the #SpecialCounsel, #JackSmith, to revise Trump’s conditions of release by forbidding him to make any public comments that might endanger federal agents working on the prosecution.
On Fri, Smith’s team requested …a limited #GagOrder on #Trump, prompted by what it called “grossly misleading” social media posts Trump made last wk falsely claiming that the #FBI had been authorized to kill him when agents searched #MarALago….
Trump’s stmnts were based on a recently unsealed order for the search that contained boilerplate language spelling out that the use of deadly force could be used only in case of emergency, a standard provision applied to all FBI searches.
The #DOJ policy statement on when officers can use #LethalForce —misrepresented by Trump & his supporters as proof of an assassination plot at #MarALago —was also in the paperwork for the consensual search the #FBI conducted of #POTUS Biden’s Wilmington home, looking for #ClassifiedDocuments.
4 months after the #FBI raided #MarALago, Trump’s attys discovered 4 docs marked #classified in his personal bedroom.
That revelation was among several cited by US District Judge Beryl Howell in a newly unsealed 2023 opinion that found prosecutors had presented compelling #evidence that #Trump#knowingly stashed #NationalSecurity docs in his home & then tried to conceal them when the #DOJ tried to retrieve them.
Throughout the opinion, Howell — who was chief judge of the Washington, DC federal district court at the time — described w/varying degrees of incredulity how 4 documents w/ classification markings could have been discovered in #Trump’s private quarters months after prosecutors had subpoenaed them & the #FBI conducted its own exhaustive search of the property.
Related: Chief Judge Boasberg denied#Trump “body man” #WaltNauta’s request to transfer some #GrandJury materials from DC to #Florida, says #Nauta failed to make specific case.