A federal judge handed former President Donald Trump a loss Monday by rejecting his motion to dismiss a number of charges in the Mar-a-Lago secret documents case. But the right-wing jurist found a way to slip a small piece of help to Trump in the decision, wrote legal expert Lisa Rubin in a thread on X.
Cannon, herself a Trump appointee, has repeatedly come under fire for skewing the trial toward Trump, including postponing the trial well past the date of the November election with the justification there were too many pretrial disputes to sort through after she herself sat on those disputes for months.
"In a new opinion tonight, Judge Aileen Cannon denies a motion to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago docs case due to alleged pleading deficiencies in the obstruction and false statement charges of the indictment. But there's a sweetener for Trump and his campaign chief Susie Wiles," Rubin wrote. "And that sweetener was her decision to strike paragraph 36 of the indictment, which concerns Trump's alleged showing, while at Bedminster, a classified map of a country with 'an ongoing military operation' 'not going well' to a 'PAC Representative' reported to be Wiles."
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The reasoning Cannon gave, Rubin continued, is that "where prosecutors want to introduce evidence of prior crimes or wrongs, they have to provide 'pre-trial notice' of the reasons justifying use of such evidence for purposes other than showing the defendant's propensity to act in a given way, and motion practice ensues."
"Even assuming that would be a typical decision, Cannon never explains how the two preceding paragraphs — which also implicates Trump in showing classified information to Mark Meadows's ghostwriter and publisher at Bedminster — are any different," wrote Rubin. "Can anyone make this make sense and explain why the indictment had to be modified but only as to one of the Bedminster episodes?"
This comes as Cannon is also set to preside over a lengthy argument, complete with extensive testimony from outside constitutional experts, about whether special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed to prosecute the case against Trump.