U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's recent string of orders tilting the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case — and particularly the order allowing a bunch of right-wing lawyers to give outside arguments in a hearing on whether special counsel Jack Smith was properly appointed — is incredibly unusual and strange, former federal prosecutor Mary McCord explained on Wednesday's edition of MSNBC's "All In."
"When I saw this order being conceived, I went around talking to people," said anchor Chris Hayes. "I was like, amici at a district court hearing? I asked my wife, who is a legal scholar, does this happen? She was like, no. Everyone else was like, I've never seen it. How common is this?"
"It's not that uncommon to file an amicus brief in the court of appeals, and sometimes an amicus brief in the district court, particularly on novel issues," said McCord. "I would argue this is not novel. To invite amici who don't represent an entity like a foreign government, to invite amici to participate, I've never seen in my career. Even in the Supreme Court, in 35 years between 1980 and 2015, out of the over 4,000 arguments the court held, they had amici present argument in 1,000 of those cases, but only nine of those were people not representing a governmental entity or foreign sovereign. That is how exceedingly rare it is."
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"Usually when this happens it is like, Texas, you are not a party to this, but you have an interest. Or the Department of Justice," said Hayes. "This is just like, you are a guy with some takes. Takes on the constitutionality. You are not connected to the case at all, you just have some opinions about it."
"That's right, and each does express the interest they represent and why they think what they have to say would be helpful to the court," said McCord. "That is what they say in their motion to file the brief. I am not surprised the court allowed some of these briefs, but to give them 30 minutes each of argument time in what is now scheduled for a full day of arguments on just one part of this issue, whether the appointment of the special counsel violates the Appointments Act. Not even the other part of the issue that Mr. Trump argues, which is that it violates the Appropriations Clause. First of all, that is an extraordinary amount of argument time on a single issue and to invite amici to present 30 minutes of argument. Most oral arguments aren't even 30 minutes per side or party. So this is really extraordinary."
"I will say that those who requested oral argument representing amici who support Donald Trump's motion, there was a brief filed on behalf of of those supporting Jack Smith's side of this and those people said, if the other guys get to argue, then we want to argue, too," she added. "And Judge Aileen Cannon did grant that, so we will have someone arguing as well who is supporting Jack Smith."
Watch the video below or at the link right here.
Mary McCord analyzes Aileen Cannon's orders www.youtube.com
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