A hearing before Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday indicated that Donald Trump will not be indicted for his theft and withholding of national security documents before the 2024 election. That is still a possibility. Attorneys at the Department of Justice insist that it could happen. But every indication is that Cannon will sit down and give Trump the one thing he wants most: an indefinite delay.
It’s hard to argue with special counsel Jack Smith. Since his appointment last November, Smith has worked diligently to assemble a team, sit on major cases, review evidence, interview witnesses, and indict Donald Trump on 37 charges. This is not a bad accomplishment in just seven months, especially considering that Smith he oversees a separate investigation into trying to overturn the 2020 elections at the same time.
This is not to say that everyone acted as quickly as they could to move the matter forward. Attorney General Merrick Garland waited months before naming Smith as special counsel. But the biggest reason for the delay was Cannon’s willingness to give in to whatever Trump wanted. There’s no sign that this will stop anytime soon, and the DOJ’s only move to impeach Cannon will only make matters worse.
Tuesday, Cannon refused to set a date for the beginning of the Trump case. Federal prosecutors want the trial in December. Trump’s attorneys presented two arguments at once: Trump is only being impeached because he wants to be president, and because he is running for president, Trump should receive special treatment. He insisted that the trial not be held until November 2024 so as not to interfere with Trump’s campaign. Basically, Trump gets special treatment as long as he is nice special treatment.
Until now, Cannon he is seen shaking his head. Although he insisted at the beginning of Tuesday that he would be able to set a time, no schedule has been set. It is not clear when there will be another issue. On the ladder of things to be done, Cannon has yet to set the first step.
But the biggest sign of what Cannon wanted may not have come in the trial date negotiations. When prosecutors asked Cannon to enter a defense order against the findings, he refused it on the grounds that there was no “reasonable disagreement” with Trump’s security team. But the reason the two legal teams have not met on this issue is the Trump team he avoided the meeting. They told state attorneys that they could not meet at the time they wanted, and then failed to make a phone call to discuss a possible date.
In his decision, Cannon did what he has done at every level for Trump: he rewarded him and delayed the process again. The administration still has to get Trump’s team to meet to secure important national security documents at the time the case is discovered. Trump’s team has seen excellent demonstrations that failure to comply gets them what they want.
Since Trump’s lawyers sought out Cannon last summer, it has become clear that his loyalty was to Trump. Cannon has been a judge for at least three years. Just completed the 14 day trial. Its only appearance in legal literature comes from being slap down hard and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for its special granting of a special master to review confidential documents and its efforts to delay the process which was unnecessary.
There are 26 active judges in the Southern District of Florida. It is fair to say that Cannon is an unqualified and highly biased judge in this case.
That Cannon ended up overseeing the case is due to two things. One is an autonomous unit in the Southern region that distributes cases by region. Cannon is one of only four judges who hear cases at the Palm Beach resort of Mar-a-Lago. One of these people is a senior judge who is rarely assigned to cases. Another point is the tradition that shows that the judge who was involved in the original case still has information that may be needed when the case is tried.
The first factor reduced the chance that Cannon could be in the case to 1 in 3. The second made it almost certain.
What Cannon had done earlier in the case was putting his finger on the scale apparently The 11th Circuit intervened to squash it its all boring and a lot of time special master stupidity doesn’t matter. The idea is that participation in the past was a good thing, even though it wasn’t.
Trump’s one real skill in life may be his understanding of how easy it is for a well-armed man to delay any court. Drag your feet. File changes. Delay. Appeals. Ask to be heard. Reduce the information. Appeal. Go to the high court. Wait until the last possible second… and then they will act in a different way. All of this is how Mr. Trump survived all these investigations and how he survived more than 3,500 criminal charges.
Trump’s team already has Cannon on the brink of declaring “hardship,” which is another way of saying that everything is going down a gear to slow down.
Here’s one hypothetical scenario moving forward: Cannon delays setting the deadline until October or November, then accepts Trump’s proposed election date. The DOJ goes to the 11th Circuit seeking Cannon’s dismissal. The 11th Circuit agrees and … there will be no trial before the election.
In Mar-a-Lago’s research petitions, it took four months for the 11th Circuit to change Cannon’s rules to create a special master. This parallel process could mean that any attempt to remove Cannon, even if successful, would not take place until after the first primary in 2024, and only if the special counsel team is successful. Refusing to use Cannon’s special master was easy. Removing a district judge from a case won’t come without complaints and without clear evidence that Cannon has crossed a line.
Trump’s trial could end in March or April 2024. There is no law that says it can’t. But if the case is assigned to another judge, the process will restart and that judge will feel pressured to take Trump from the campaign to the documents case.
Overall, the chances of Trump being tried on these charges before the 2024 election are remote. And, of course, if any Republican wins office in the next election, the chances are 100% that Trump will be pardoned or the attorney general will tell the DOJ to drop the case.
But assuming Trump loses, he hopes his lawyers will be back in the jury room in November 2024, asking for a delay.