Ex-prosecutor shares big red flag he says shows Aileen Cannon is in the bag for Trump
Former top prosecutor Andrew Weissmann pointed to two tells that he said show Judge Aileen Cannon is in the bag for Donald Trump.
Cannon is currently overseeing Trump's classified documents case alleging he improperly took White House documents as he left in power January 2020.
"Her refusal to have the assigned Magistrate Judge, who is far more experienced than she, handle any pretrial motions," tips her hand that she doesn't want anyone else involved for a reason, Weissmann said on MSNBC.
"One, it would move the case along (i.e. she does not want it to go to trial before the election)," he said. "Two, the Magistrate Judge would rule impartially, and she [would] then have to overrule him and would look that much worse."
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Weissmann anticipated Cannon "will do the bare minimum for the U.S. government to avoid being reversed and removed. And won’t hold a trial before the election."
Speaking to Lawrence O'Donnell on Monday night, reporter and MSNBC contributor Adam Klasfeld walked through how disproportionately favorable Cannon is to Trump's lawyers — while she reprimanded a prosecutor from the special counsel's office Monday for his "tone."
"And for all of her tone policing," Trump's lawyer was "able to cast dispersions" willy-nilly. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche essentially gave a campaign speech, Klasfeld said, adding that he threw out a number of conspiracy theories that President Joe Biden was the puppetmaster behind the entire prosecution of Trump over the stolen documents.
O'Donnell found it ironic that the judge could chastise anyone about their tone in a hearing that involved claims that Trump encouraged attacks on FBI agents.
"Federal judges have never had to consider protecting FBI agents nationally, and her worry is the tone," O'Donnell said.
Weissmann called the move "one of many, many signs she is not up to the task here."
One of the problems, he said, is that even if you took issue with the idea that Judge Cannon "believed that the allegations were not strong enough to do what the government wants, you would not decide to hear this a month after the allegations are raised. It should have been heard promptly."
Her additional point is that nothing specifically targets the agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago case "because I've kept their names private."
Weissmann said that the government was forced to tell Cannon, "That's actually factually not true. The names have leaked out and these names will continue to leak out. And two, that's so myopic because there have been threats against other FBI agents."