https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/21/trump-on-trial-comedy-of-errors?ref=upstract.comOn the docket: rookie mistakes
It’s been a chaotic week in Trump’s criminal trials – and a lot of the mayhem has been caused by self-owns and missteps by the legal figures involved in his various cases.
When Judge Aileen Cannon, a federal judge with only three years of experience on the bench, issued her latest order in the criminal classified documents case on Monday, legal observers were dumbfounded.
The national security attorney Bradley Moss posted on X that her instructions were “legally insane”. Attorney George Conway, a leading #NeverTrump conservative, responded by calling it “utterly nuts”. The former US attorney Joyce Vance called it “two pages of crazy” and wrote that she had to read the order multiple times to try to figure out what it means.
“Not only should Aileen Cannon not be sitting on this case, but she should not be sitting on the federal bench at all,” Conway posted.
Cannon’s Monday order told Trump’s attorneys and the justice department’s special counsel’s office to prepare potential jury instructions for legal scenarios that, as Guardian US reporter Hugo Lowellwrites, “gave extraordinary credit to Trump’s defense theories” and “were so beneficial to Trump and so potentially incorrect on the law of the Espionage Act that it would bring into serious doubt whether it made sense for prosecutors to take the case to trial”.
The order came as Cannon dragged her feet on ruling on various other provisions – and after the 11th circuit court had to step in to unanimously overturn an earlier decision from Cannon to appoint a special master to review the classified documents in the case in late 2022, writing “the law is clear” and she was wrong.
It’s an open question whether Cannon’s stumbles are down to incompetence, favoritism towards Trump, or both. But although she’s been the most egregious legal figure in all of Trump’s criminal trials in terms of her questionable actions, Cannon shares something with some of the main characters in Trump’s other criminal cases that might help explain why things keep going sideways: inexperience.
Cannon, age 43, became a federal judge in late 2020 after being appointed to the federal bench by Donald Trump, then the president. That’s not much time to actually learn the job, as she’s showing day after day after day. She took her spot on the bench around the same time as the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, who’s leading the prosecution of the criminal case against Trump for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, was elected to office. They’re old hands compared with Georgia judge Scott McAfee, a 34-year-old who’s overseeing the case Willis has been working on and was appointed to the bench just over a year ago.
Last Friday, McAfee ruled that Willis could remain on the case – so long as special prosecutor Nathan Wade was removed (Wade resigned later that day). McAfee wrote in his order that Willis’s decision to start a financial and romantic relationship with someone she was supervising was a “tremendous lapse in judgment”.
That was another win for Trump, as Guardian US reporter Sam Levine unpacks. Willis and Wade’s romantic relationship dominated headlines, raised questions about impropriety, bruised her reputation and delayed the trial for two months as Trump and his co-defendants sought to get them removed.
And McAfee’s Wednesday decision to let Trump appeal his order means that Georgia’s court of appeals now has 45 days to consider the appeal – another delay. If the court agrees to overrule McAfee and force Willis off the case, it could be stalled indefinitely.
The one trial that had looked like a sure bet to conclude before election day hit a major bump as well – though it’s not yet clear exactly who’s at fault.
In New York, Judge Juan Merchan granted a delay until at least 15 April in Trump’s hush-money criminal trial last Thursday after Trump’s lawyers asked for more time to sift through tens of thousands of pages of evidence from the US attorney’s office in Manhattan that they hadn’t received until recent weeks. Trump’s team had asked for a three-month delay, part of their public strategy of delaying all of his trials as long as possible; the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had acceded to a one-month delay.
Merchan is holding a hearing on 25 March, the day the trial was originally supposed to kick off, where he’ll investigate why Trump’s team didn’t receive this information earlier – and whether the Manhattan DA or the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York is to blame, and what, if anything, should be done to remedy the situation. He could also determine a new trial date.
It’s notable that Bragg has only been in his job since early 2022. We’ll know more in the coming days about whether the first-term DA made a major misstep in this case.
Sidebar: Trump’s half-billion-dollar headache
Trump’s criminal trials may be plodding along – but penalties for his civil trials are coming due.
Lawyers for Trump said on Monday he could not post a bond covering the full amount of the $454m civil fraud judgment against him, asking the courts to delay the deadline while he appeals the New York ruling from his business fraud civil trial that concluded earlier this year. Posting the bond, lawyers said, was “a practical impossibility” after 30 surety companies turned him down.
Trump and co-defendants, including his company and top executives, owe $467m including interest. To obtain a bond, Trump’s lawyers said, they would be required to post collateral worth $557m.
“A bond requirement of this enormous magnitude – effectively requiring cash reserves approaching $1bn – is unprecedented for a private company,” the Monday filing said.
Trump is clearly upset – he posted seven times in two hours on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday railing against the ruling and the judge who oversaw the case.
“I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” he posted in one screed.
