Judge Cannon: Sure, Trump Lied That The FBI Tried To Murder Him. But The Real Crime Is Not Asking Him NICELY To Stop.
OTOH, it's not like the special counsel wasn't on notice that Judge Cannon was like this.
Aileen Cannon
Donald Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche took time out of preparing for closing arguments in the New York criminal case to throw one hell of a tantrum in Florida last night. In a motion for contempt and sanctions, Blanche accused the special counsel of “unsupported histrionics” and “pursuing media coverage rather than justice.”
It’s a lot.
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The kerfuffle began on Friday night when Special Counsel Jack Smith’s filed a motion to modify the conditions of Trump’s release, asking the court “to make clear that he may not make statements that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case.” The government cited Trump’s repeated lies about a “report” he claimed to have been shown that proved the FBI agents who executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago intended to assassinate him.
In reality, the “report” was boilerplate language from the FBI’s “Policy Statement on Use of Deadly Force,” which was part of the operations order for the warrant. Trump’s own lawyers have had this document since at least February and attached it as an exhibit to a recently unsealed motion to suppress the evidence collected during the search, as well as the grand jury testimony of his lawyer Evan Corcoran. That motion asks Judge Cannon to overrule an “unconstitutional” order by her fellow District Court Judge Beryl Howell, and even requests dismissal of the case because the prosecutors had the temerity to rely upon it.
It also misquotes that policy statement, omitting the word “only” from the sentence “Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary,” while making gratuitous reference to “handcuffs,” “ammo,” and “bolt cutters.” Almost as if it were part of a planned media cycle designed to gin up maximum outrage.
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Whether or not this was part of a plan, Trump and his supporters spent much of last week accusing the FBI and President Biden of seeking to assassinate him based on the court exhibit.
“Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” one fundraising email screamed.
Christina Bobb, Trump’s attorney who was present during the search, joined in the … histrionics.
“Predictably and as he certainly intended, others have amplified Trump’s misleading statements, falsely characterizing the inclusion of the entirely standard use-of-force policy as an effort to ‘assassinate’ Trump,” prosecutors wrote on Friday night, pointing to that little quotation oopsie in Trump’s suppression motion.
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Prosecutors noted that the FBI had deliberately executed the warrant when they knew Trump and his family would be out of state, adding that the former president had “grossly distorted” the FBI’s “standard practices by mischaracterizing them as a plan to kill him, his family, and U.S. Secret Service agents.”
Noting that courts in DC and New York have recently issued gag orders on the former president during criminal proceedings after finding ample evidence that the objects of his ire face harassment and threats, the prosecutors asked the court to “exercise its authority to impose a condition that Trump may not make public statements that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to the law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”
In a footnote on the very first page, prosecutors noted that the defense did not consider conferral obligations to have been met, but they cannot possibly have anticipated the 120-decibel work of performance art Blanche staged last night.
“For the reasons set forth below, in light of the Office’s blatant violation of Local Rule 88.9 and related warnings from the Court, the Court should strike the Motion, make civil contempt findings as to all government attorneys who participated in the decision to file the Motion without meaningful conferral, and impose sanctions after holding an evidentiary hearing regarding the purpose and intent behind the Office’s decision to willfully disregard required procedures,” he wrote, accusing the prosecution of “a string of procedural abuses and misrepresentations over the course of many months.”
His chief complaint appears to be that the special counsel filed the motion on a Friday night of a holiday weekend, rejecting Trump’s demand to meet and confer on Monday, writing in an email that “there was no likelihood of further conferral resulting in agreement or even narrowing issues before the court.” And indeed Blanche’s own communications appear to concede that point, as well as his motion which treats the request for a gag order as an assault on the First Amendment.
The Motion goes one step further, however, in seeking to condition President Trump’s liberty on his compliance with the views of Smith, Bratt, Harbach, and the other self-appointed Thought Police regarding what constitutes fair argument to the American people by the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential application. In that regard, the Motion is an unprecedented application, and the abuses that it reflects are manifest. If and when there is an appropriate time, we will forcefully address the Motion on the merits.
Blanche makes a great fuss about not knowing which of Trump’s posts endanger law enforcement, although the special counsel’s office attached them to its communications. He also claims that there’s no imminent danger to the agents, because their names are redacted in the public filings. In reality, multiple FBI agents who participated in the search have already been doxxed after someone gave an unredacted copy of the warrant to Breitbart two years ago.
Trump’s lawyers show utter disrespect for the rulings of other courts, referring to the gag order approved by the DC Circuit and then copied in New York by Justice Juan Merchan as “unconstitutional.” At the same time, they lean into praising Judge Aileen Cannon for her most immoderate behavior, such as her order to put grand jury testimony on the public docket and her suggestion that the parties craft jury instructions which were functionally an instruction to acquit.
In the event, Judge Cannon denied both motions without prejudice, but in the most pissy way possible.
PAPERLESS ORDER denying without prejudice for lack of meaningful conferral 581 the Special Counsel’s Motion to Modify Conditions of Release. Upon review of the Motion 581 [581-1], Defendant Trump’s procedural opposition 583, and the attached email correspondence between counsel [583-1], the Court finds the Special Counsel’s pro forma “conferral” to be wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy. It should go without saying that meaningful conferral is not a perfunctory exercise. Sufficient time needs to be afforded to permit reasonable evaluation of the requested relief by opposing counsel and to allow for adequate follow-up discussion as necessary about the specific factual and legal basis underlying the motion. This is so even when a party “assume[s]” the opposing party will oppose the proposed motion [583-1], and it applies with additional force when the relief sought — at issue for the first time in this proceeding and raised in a procedurally distinct manner than in cited cases — implicates substantive and/or Constitutional questions. Because the filing of the Special Counsel’s Motion did not adhere to these basic requirements, it is due to be denied without prejudice. Any future, non-emergency motion brought in this case — whether on the topic of release conditions or anything else — shall not be filed absent meaningful, timely, and professional conferral. S.D. Fla. L.R. 88.9, 7.1(a)(3); see ECF No. 28 p. 2; ECF No. 82. Moreover, all certificates of conference going forward shall (1) appear in a separate section at the end of the motion, not embedded in editorialized footnotes; (2) specify, in objective terms, the exact timing, method, and substance of the conferral conducted; and (3) include, if requested by opposing counsel, no more than 200 words verbatim from the opposing side on the subject of conferral, again in objective terms. Failure to comply with these requirements may result in sanctions. In light of this Order, the Court determines to deny without prejudice Defendant Trump’s Motion to Strike and for Sanctions 583 .
So, there you have it. The defendant can doxx law enforcement agents and falsely accuse them of trying to murder him. But if the prosecutors don’t ask nicely enough and quote the defense verbatim, then it’s contempt and sanctions.
US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]
