Legal experts accused U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon of "quietly sabotaging" the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump following her Friday ruling against special counsel Jack Smith. Cannon's order denied Smith's request that she compel Trump to state whether he intends to use an "advice of counsel" defense of ahead of the May 20 trial.
In a Tuesday analysis for Slate, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut and longtime Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe argued Cannon's move is part of an existing pattern of her "laying the groundwork for delaying Trump’s trial—until it’s too late for a jury to be empaneled and the case tried to verdict before the election." The legal experts pointed to Cannon's November order "slow-walking" the pretrial motions in the case and cited previous arguments from ex-CIA attorney Brian Greer and New York University law professor Andrew Weissman that the Trump appointee is stealthily working to delay the trial for his benefit.
"By continuing to maintain the trial date while rendering the date virtually impossible to keep, Cannon evidently hopes to maintain plausible deniability from charges like Greer’s or Weissmann’s," Tribe and Aftergut write. "At the same time, her pretense that the trial will commence on schedule prevents any attempt by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis to seek to advance into May the scheduling of her prosecution of Trump for attempting to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election." It's "difficult," they added, "to imagine that anything that deserves to be called justice will emerge from a criminal proceeding over which Cannon presides in which the fate of her benefactor, and thus her own career, is at stake."
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