Judge Aileen Cannon is seriously entertaining a "ludicrous" legal theory put forward by former President Donald Trump in the jury questionnaire procedure, former House January 6 litigator Eric Columbus told Law & Crime's Brandi Buchman.
Specifically, Cannon, a right-wing judge appointed by Trump himself, appears to be open to Trump's demand for the jury to be told about his interpretation of the Presidential Records Act as potentially exonerating for his decision to conceal hundreds of highly classified national defense documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
That, he said, is "very puzzling."
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“It continues to rest on this notion that Trump has been prattling on about; that somehow, the Presidential Records Act limits the application of the Espionage Act … but one has nothing to do with the other," said Columbus. "The PRA passed in wake of Nixon and no one has thought it had anything to do with classified documents. PRA was intended to reduce the ability of presidents to abscond with their records, to make it harder. With Nixon, they had to buy his records off of him and PRA made it so you can’t dot that, basically. The idea that, without ever saying so, the legislation somehow gave the president a new right to walk away with classified records if he somehow declared them to be personal is just ludicrous.”
This comes following a number of controversial moves Cannon made throughout the process that appears to put a thumb on the scale for the former president, according to some experts.
Even before Trump was charged, she ordered the FBI to surrender the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, even though they were essential to making a counterintelligence assessment, and turn them over to a special master to determine if they were subject to executive privilege — a move a conservative panel of appellate judges, including two Trump appointees, swiftly overturned. She subsequently ordered special counsel Jack Smith to hand over identifying information about key witnesses to Trump's defense team, even though Smith repeatedly warned this could expose them to witness tampering.
Meanwhile, Cannon has given no indication of how far back she plans to move the trial date, dragging her feet in a way that could prevent the case from being heard before the election altogether.