Special Counsel Jack Smith's latest filing in the Florida classified documents case is carefully tailored to expose a jurist who has tipped the scales for defendant Donald Trump, legal experts said Friday.
Smith on Friday asked Judge Cannon, who is overseeing the case, to gag Trump to prevent the former president from making further statements that could endanger law enforcement officers. The filing is based on Trump's recent repetition of a false conspiracy theory that mischaracterized the search of his Mar-a-Lago golf club as an attempt to take his life.
But the filing is a trap for Cannon, who has been accused of slow-walking the ex-president's case such that the trial has been indefinitely postponed.
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Roger Parloff, a senior editor at Lawfare, noted that the special counsel's new motion, seeking to halt the recent lies about an assassination attempt, "is crafted to highlight Judge Cannon's bias and hypocrisy if she fails to take action."
"The motion twice cites Cannon's order 'ECF 101' in which she, on her own, invoked her 'independent obligation to protect the integrity of this judicial proceeding' in order to probe a dubious defense allegation of a prosecutor's ethical breach," according to Parloff. "Jack's new motion challenges Cannon to act on Trump's outlandish attacks on the FBI--which have already triggered an armed attack on an FBI office in Cincinnati--with a fraction of her solicitude for policing special counsel's ethics."
Andrew Weissmann, the former top prosecutor on former special counsel Robert Mueller's team, hailed the move by Smith's team.
"Smart move by Smith as Judge Cannon won't be likely to grant the gag order, will show her patent bias, and Smith can then appeal to the 11th Circuit," he said Friday.