'Legally insane': Judge Cannon's latest filing slammed by experts as 'utterly nuts'

Judge Aileen Cannon appears to be inviting a future jury to pore over Donald Trump's seized classified materials — despite them being national secrets — while putting constraints on her own duties.

In her most recent filing Monday, Cannon also wants to task jurors with figuring out if the former president can rightfully consider the documents as his personal property — a claim she is supposed to be deciding after he used it as an argument for his case to be dismissed.

"In prosecution of a former president for allegedly retaining documents," her filing says, "... a jury is permitted to examine a record retained by a former president in his/her personal possession at the end of his/her presidency and make a factual finding as to whether the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it is personal or presidential using the definitions set forth in the Presidential Records Act (PRA)."

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The filing was slammed by lawyer and Trump critic George Conway.

"Okay, I’ve seen enough," he wrote on Threads.

"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."

"This second scenario is legally insane," wrote national security lawyer Brad Moses.

"If that were the case, the just grant Trump's motion to dismiss of PRA grounds so DOJ bring it to 11th Circuit for a quick reversal."

Upon losing the 2020 presidential election, the former president squirreled away boxes of White House documents and hoarded them at his Palm Beach palatial in Mar-a-Lago.

The National Archives kept pressing him to return them but claims it was rebuffed. The Department of Justice executing a subpoena to recover some of the documents.

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Trump and two of his subordinates have pleaded not guilty.

Cannon's latest move leaves a great deal of interpretation and possibly some of her own responsibilities to others. And it's being panned by some legal experts.

Former impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen argued that the former president is making a desperate attempt to try to lean on the Presidential Records Act (PRA) to justify his actions. He said, that "doesn’t pass muster because that statute doesn’t actually have anything to do with the critical question of whether his possession of these documents was authorized."

"Cannon seems inclined to push the case to trial but is basically asking if she can stack the deck so Trump wins," according to Eisen. "It’s clumsy [and] amateurish — seems to know she’s wobbly [and] she’s asking the parties for help with threshold things that are normally figured out by the judge."

Eisen is convinced that should Cannon proceed down this road of outsourcing some of her duties to others, she can be overruled.

He notes that it would then involve special counsel Jack Smith, who "can and will go to the 11th Circuit... this [and] several other recent (threatened) blunders five him ammo to have her reversed [and] removed."

One notable reversal, and there have been multiple, involved Cannon's attempt to appoint a special master to oversee the review of the seized classified documents ahead of a trial.

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