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Perhaps we’ve been imprecise in our understanding of District Judge Aileen Cannon, the moron Trump appointee who has seemingly made it her personal mission to make sure Donald Trump’s trial for the grave crimes of stealing America’s secrets and obstructing efforts to get them back never happens.
It’s not that she’s not a partisan hack. She is. And it’s not that she’s not dumb. She is.
It just may be that we really need to focus more on how deeply unqualified for this role she is, and how her own own knowledge of that might be informing her inability to preside over this case even more than we knew. A few weeks back, legal expert Asha Rangappa proffered this theory, which struck us as brilliant in its simplicity:
“I think that Judge Cannon is intellectually out of her league and is having some weird analysis paralysis because her personal partisanship makes her place Trump’s bizarre arguments (like that nuclear secrets are his personal records) on par with Smith’s *actual* legal arguments. She’s afraid of making any mistake, lest Smith have a basis to appeal and perhaps get her removed, and so in this lost, ineffective, and paranoid state, the best she can hope for is that Trump gets elected and the case just goes away. So that’s her play.”
Reading today’s New York Times piece on Cannon, we think Rangappa nailed it.
The Times headline says the “emerging portrait” of Cannon in this case is that she’s “prepared, prickly, and slow.” That strikes us an extremely diplomatic way of saying “In over her head, extremely touchy about it, and yes also slow.”
The writer, Alan Feuer, sets the scene:
A few months ago, a top prosecutor on former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case stood up in court and told Judge Aileen M. Cannon that he was concerned about the pace of the proceeding, gingerly expressing his desire to keep the matter “moving along.”
Almost instantly, Judge Cannon got defensive.
“I can assure you that in the background there is a great deal of judicial work going on,” she snapped. “So while it may not appear on the surface that anything is happening, there is a ton of work being done.”
Like we said, touchy.
Feuer describes Cannon as “industrious but inexperienced and often insecure,” and notes how her handling of this case has become “bogged down in unresolved issues,” owing to how even the stupidest delay tactic requests from Trump’s legal team require 12 million years of hearings and filings, in order to help Cannon understand basic facts.
We saw this from the very beginning with Cannon’s mind-bendingly weird decision to appoint a special master to sort through the evidence seized at Mar-a-Lago for both executive privilege and attorney-client purposes, as well as the new legal standard she invented for Trump, which was that getting indicted would be embarrassing. She therefore brought the investigation to a screeching halt, for some reasons she made up on the fly. (Please avail yourself of that link for a refresher on how utterly and ignorantly bonkers that decision by Cannon was. Then refresh yourself on how completely the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals smacked down her ruling.)
We saw this with Cannon’s recent bizarre team-building exercise where she forced Special Counsel Jack Smith to come up with scenarios for jury instructions just in case she decided the Presidential Records Act applied to Trump’s case. This was weird, because any layman can understand that it doesn’t, simply by reading it. It was foolishness, and Smith said that repeatedly in his filings, while technically going through the motions of following her instructions.
In her response to Smith, Cannon was shocked and offended by the special counsel’s mean and nasty insinuations that her “genuine attempt” to understand the case wasn’t sincere. That being said, she seemed to try to concede after the fact that of course Smith was right, the Presidential Records Act did not apply, as if to protest, what do you think I am, some kind of complete moron?
Well …
Now this week, we are sitting around waiting while Cannon avoids ruling on whether it’s cool for Trump to lie and say the FBI tried to assassinate him, thereby putting agents in danger, or whether that’s not fine. We’re sure she’ll have about 45,000 more questions about that one before it’s resolved.
And more is coming down the pike after that! And after that! And maybe if she delays long enough, Trump can be president again and she can sit next to him at a special Mar-a-Lago inauguration luncheon for Trump’s special helpers and she’ll get to wear a Burger King crown and there will be pizza and …
Prepared, prickly, slow, touchy, confused, in over her head, slow.
We should note that in Feuer’s article, the “prepared” part comes across like a student who really really really studied for the exam, and who takes great pleasure in demonstrating that she has memorized the material. Of course there are times when something happens in class that she hasn’t had a chance to study yet:
… Judge Cannon was debating with Jay Bratt, one of the prosecutors, about a common theory of legal liability called the Pinkerton rule. The rule holds that all members of a conspiracy can be held accountable for any crimes committed by their co-conspirators.
Mr. Bratt said the rule would likely apply to Mr. Trump’s dealings with his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, employees of Mar-a-Lago who have been accused of conspiring with the former president to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve the classified materials.
Judge Cannon seemed a bit perplexed and asked Mr. Bratt what authority he intended to rely on in applying the Pinkerton rule. Mr. Bratt seemed almost sheepish in having to lay things out for her so simply.
“So the authority is Pinkerton,” he said, and launched into a quick explanation.
One of Judge Cannon’s most enduring habits is her tendency to ask the same question several times. It is never quite clear if she does not understand the answers she is receiving or is trying to push back against them.
We don’t know how Cannon was a federal prosecutor before she was a judge if she hadn’t heard about Pinkerton and coconspirators. Badly we guess? Feuer has several more examples where that one came from. They’re excruciating!
So yeah, maybe Aileen Cannon is an idiot, and maybe her four years of experience didn’t prepare her for the big leagues. And maybe she’s terrified she’s going to fuck up, and that’s why she’s so slow and asks questions 46 times and it never seems clear whether she understands the answer. And maybe she’s incredibly self-conscious about all this. And maybe if she wasn’t in so far over her head, she wouldn’t feel like this.
And yeah, maybe on top of that, she’s a garden variety MAGA Melanie who just wants the defendant to love her.
Maybe.
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