U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon agreed Thursday to hold another hearing on Donald Trump's effort to prevent his attorney's notes from being used as evidence — a move that left one legal expert gobsmacked.
The Trump-appointed federal judge denied the former president's request for a hearing on alleged false statements or omissions in the affidavit used to obtain the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, but granted his request for an evidentiary hearing on small details in the warrant and attorney-client privilege.
"Judge Cannon's latest handiwork -- the hearing on 'particularity' — is particularly ill-founded legally," said former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
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"And on crime-fraud, it is not clear to me why this issue is not precluded ('issue preclusion,' just like what happened in the second E Jean Carroll trial) by the fully litigated issue having been decided by the D.C. court after Trump was heard."
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Cannon's 11-page order set a hearing to determine whether specific evidence from former Trump attorney Even Corcoran should be excluded due to attorney-client privilege, despite the crime fraud exception which states the privilege doesn't apply if the conversations relate to ongoing or future crimes.
In D.C, Judge Beryl Howell has already ruled that Corcoran needed to testify because of the exception.
"The concern about crime-fraud 'mini-trials' has been expressed by courts in the grand jury context ... and it makes sense that such a concern reasonably would apply in the post-indictment context, too, at least in a general way," Cannon wrote. "But there is a difference between a resource-wasting and delay-producing 'mini-trial,' on the one hand, and an evidentiary hearing geared to adjudicating the contested factual and legal issues on a given pre-trial motion to suppress, on the other."
