Aileen Cannon
Sometimes Judge Aileen Cannon likes to mix up the absolute hackery by doing real judge stuff. You know … to keep ’em on their toes! And so last night, she took a break during a two-week stretch of pure partisan nonsense to issue a real order.
Cue the golf claps.
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The south Florida jurist, installed during Trump’s last lame duck session, dismissed the stolen documents case last summer after deciding that special counsels are illegal. Nevertheless, she happily grabbed an oar and started paddling when her patron asked for help thwarting the release of the special counsel report, which would remind Americans what an abject criminal he is. And even after the Eleventh Circuit denied an identical petition, she insisted that she had continuing jurisdiction — obligation even! — to enjoin the release of the report insofar as it might impact the trial of Trump’s co-conspirators, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. Of course, that trial is never going to happen, since she dismissed the case and Trump is going to pardon them and kill the appeal next week. But invoking the specter of a trial, Cannon blustered up a justification to enjoin release of Volume 2 of the special counsel’s report, which describes the documents case. She purports to have grave concerns that the report will leak and harm the (nonexistent) case, even if the only people who get to see it are the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. But she could not shoehorn herself into jurisdiction over Volume 1, which deals with the election interference case in DC — although not for lack of trying. And so, with a couple snarky footnotes for the prosecutors, was forced to release her injunction on that portion of the report.
But at 9:45, less than three hours before that injunction expired, Trump took one last flyer at his pal in Palm Beach. Styled as a “Supplemental Memorandum in Support of Intervention and Emergency Relief and Emergency Request to Extend Temporary Injunction,” he invited Judge Cannon to consider once again his invitation to go all in and dare the Eleventh Circuit to do something about it.
Conceding that the judge had “yet to rule on President Trump’s Motion to Intervene or, in the Alternative, Participate as Amicus Curiae,” he requested that the court “(1) set President Trump’s motion to intervene for a hearing at the existing January 17, 2025, hearing scheduled in this matter; and (2) preserve the existing status quo by briefly extending the existing temporary restraining order, Doc. 682, as to both Volume I and II of the Final Report, until President Trump’s motion to intervene and substantive arguments are resolved.”
“Never before in our Nation’s history has the Department of Justice attempted to interfere with an incoming Presidential administration in this manner, let alone on the very eve of inauguration by means of a false report issued by a discredited prosecutor who has now resigned in disgrace,” his lawyer John Singer vamped. “Nor should the Court permit the Department to do so until providing President Trump a full and fair opportunity to be heard on these enormously consequential questions.”
Sadly, it was not meant to be.
At 11:30, Judge Cannon issued a minute order denying the requested relief, noting ruefully that her order of dismissal only unperson-ed the special counsel for the purposes of the documents case.
As indicated 697, the Order Granting Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the Superseding Indictment is confined to this proceeding 672, as is this Court’s authority to enforce its own orders in this proceeding. The Court is therefore constrained to deny the present request for emergency relief, expressing no opinion on the merits of the arguments in the Motion to Intervene as to Volume I or on the United States’ asserted urgency in releasing Volume I.
And so the report was released by the DOJ at around 12:45 a.m.
Perhaps Judge Cannon did the president a favor by denying his order. The Eleventh Circuit seems willing to let her bone the documents report, but magicking up jurisdiction over the DC case might have actually roused the appellate panel from its torpor and resulted in the release of both volumes. But Trump tends to remember the last thing his lackeys did or did not do for him, so we probably won’t be seeing Supreme Court Justice Aileen Cannon any time soon.
SAD!
US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]
US v. Trump [11th Circuit Docket via Court Listener]