Trump's Classified Docs Theft: Mar-A-Lago, FBI Subpoenas, Searches & Seizures - DOJ, Garland, GOP Madness - Spy Hard

[Suranis]

I'm not a pheasant plucker,
I'm a pheasant plucker's mate,
And I'm only plucking pheasants
'cause the pheasant plucker's late.

Plucking pheasants is a pleasure
when the pheasant plucker's near,
But when pheasants pluck at pheasants,
then the plucking's rather queer.

So, if I'm plucking pheasants,
where the pleasant pheasants roam,
I'll pluck enough for supper
till the pheasant plucker's home.

And when the pheasant plucker comes,
we'll pluck them side by side,
Through pleasant plains and pheasant fields
where pheasants love to hide.

https://www.learnarhyme.com/tongue-twis ... nt-plucker

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

[Greatgrey]

He wants to adjourn this case till 3 weeks after the hush money case is over.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... .452.0.pdf

IMG_0382.jpeg (400.32 KiB) Viewed 950 times

[Sam the Centipede]

"Waahh!! I've done so many crimes it's really difficult to fit in all the court appearances!"

Hmm. Not convinced that gripe draws buckets of sympathy from the well of human kindness.

If you can't do the court time, don't do the white collar crime.

[Dave from down under]

Cannon will make it 3 years after..

[RTH10260]

Since when does the deadline for SIPA disclosures require the former guy to be present? Also too his team knew for months that this paperwork was due, no need to to othe homework in the last minute. Are really all the same attoneys working on this and his New York fraud case at the same time?

[RVInit]

Cannon will make it 3 years after..

She clearly has no intention of Donald Trump standing trial in this case. He clearly also is going to win the election, he has made shocking inroads with minority voters which is is more than enough to offset the handful of Republicans who won't vote for him.

He will not stand trial for anything aside from the hush money/election interference case because his AG will drop all cases against him with prejudice and that will be that. The average American voter is stupid enough to elect this giant bag of pus again.

We are doomed in this country.

[Suranis]

Cannon will make it 3 years after..

She clearly has no intention of Donald Trump standing trial in this case. He clearly also is going to win the election, he has made shocking inroads with minority voters which is is more than enough to offset the handful of Republicans who won't vote for him.

He will not stand trial for anything aside from the hush money/election interference case because his AG will drop all cases against him with prejudice and that will be that. The average American voter is stupid enough to elect this giant bag of pus again.

We are doomed in this country.

Uh.. the "shocking inroads" are just the trends have have been happening with Republican voting for a while. He increased his Minority vote by 2 to 4 % past time and he still lost massivly. And that was just the fact that Minorities have been growing more republican by a factor of 2% every election in America. Why that is, is beyond my pay grade, but its been happening.

One article from 2021 talking about it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... out-surge/

► Show Spoiler

Since polls closed Nov. 3, there’s been a lot of focus on the extent to which Black and Hispanic voters seem to have been more open to President Donald Trump than they were in 2016. Preliminary exit polls showed Trump doing better with non-White voters than he had four years prior — a shift that certainly defies perceptions of Trump’s relationship with those communities.
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Sophisticated new analysis of the election results, combining polling data with a look at the voting records of millions of Americans, helps explain why that shift occurred and, more important, how it relates to the eventual outcome.

The data firm Catalist explored the 2020 electorate in a lengthy report published Monday. It breaks out the voter pool along several demographic lines, including race and education. In particular, the analysis splits up the White electorate into those with and without a college degree, a divide that emerged as essential in 2016 and 2018.

That yields a rough estimate of who turned out and how they voted that looks like this. The bars are scaled vertically relative to the percent of the electorate of each group. (Whites without college degrees were 44 percent of the electorate, for example.) The blue and red bars show the support for Joe Biden and Trump within the group. (Whites without degrees heavily preferred Trump.)

What should stand out on that chart is how White voters without college degrees are the only group that preferred Trump to Biden. Whites with degrees and Black, Hispanic and Asian (identified as AAPI: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) voters all preferred Biden to some degree.

One upshot is that Biden’s support was much more diverse than that of Trump. About 6-in-10 Biden voters were White, including a third who are White and have no college degree. More than half of Trump’s support came from that category alone, with 85 percent of his support coming from White voters overall.

This isn’t surprising, of course. The Democratic Party has consistently been more diverse than the Republican Party; it was actually more diverse 25 years ago than the GOP is now. But given the attention paid to Trump’s improvements with non-White voters, it’s important to point out that Biden got twice as much support from White voters without college degrees as Trump did from voters who weren’t White.

It’s also important to contextualize that shift to Trump with the overall change in the electorate. 2020 saw a decline in the density of White voters without college degrees relative to 2016 and 2012 before that, according to Catalist. The density of Hispanic voters increased, while the density of Black voters remained about the same, down from 2012 when President Barack Obama was seeking his second term. (We’ve excluded AAPI and other demographic groups from these charts for the sake of clarity.)

The level of support earned by Biden (measured as a share of votes for either the Democrat or the Republican since 2012) dropped among both Black and Hispanic voters while it increased substantially for Whites with college degrees and even ticked up slightly among White voters without a degree.

All of that focus on the declines obscures a key point elevated by Catalist: When combined with the increase in turnout, the net result was more votes for the Democrat.

If we roughly apply Catalist’s estimates for the density of each group to the number of votes cast in each election, you see that there were more voters in each group than there were in 2016. Yes, Whites without a college degree made up less of the electorate than four years prior, but turnout of those voters increased 10 percent.

Think about what that means. If in 2016 there were 1,000 Black voters who backed the Democrat by a 75-to-25-percent margin, that’s a net of 500 votes in favor of the Democrat. If the margin among Black voters drops to a 72-to-28-percent split but the number of voters increases to 1,200 — the Democrat nets 28 more votes. The divide between the Republican and the Democrat widens.

At some point, the increase in turnout wouldn’t be enough to offset a significant drop. That’s likely what happened with Hispanic voters: The drop in support was large enough that even with increased turnout, it meant a net loss of votes for Biden relative to 2016. The same pattern also probably worked against Biden with Whites who don’t have a college degree. Trump appears to have gained in his vote margin with those voters simply because of the increased turnout.

But among Black voters in particular, Catalist estimates that the increase in turnout was enough to not only offset the drop in the Democratic margin but, in fact, to win two key states. In Georgia, for example, 200,000 more Black voters cast ballots than in 2016 in a state Biden won by about 12,000 votes. In Arizona, an additional 30,000 Blacks voted, more than twice the state’s 10,000-vote difference.

There are two key questions that emerge. The first is who those new voters were. The second is what the long-term trend in non-White voting might be.

To answer the first question, Catalist estimates that about 14 percent of 2020 voters had never cast a ballot before. About that same number had never voted in a presidential race in their states before, meaning that they had either voted in 2018 or were casting new ballots in states to which they’d moved. (This comports with the finding that the density of new voters was higher in states that have seen bigger increases in their populations.) About two-thirds of those new voters were under the age of 30, reflecting to some extent young people who were able to vote for the first time.

That newer voters tended to be less densely White might also help explain the shift in Black and Hispanic vote margins since 2016.

“As with Latino voters,” the firm’s Yair Ghitza and Jonathan Robinson write, “it is plausible that new marginal voters entering the electorate for the first time naturally drove the overall support numbers slightly down, because these new voters are less ideological than longtime voters.”

This overlaps with analysis conducted by the firm Equis Labs. Its research found that Trump helped drive turnout particularly among more conservative Hispanic voters that helped him eat into Biden’s advantage. Its findings mirrored Catalist in another way, finding divergences among Hispanic voters depending on national origin.

Answering the second question — the one about the long-term trend — is far trickier. To some extent it depends on the ability of future candidates to inspire turnout in the way that Trump did in 2020 (both on the left and the right).

The Catalist data hints at one answer.

“[T]here are still major gains to be made in voter turnout writ large,” it reads. “This is particularly true among communities of color, where nonvoting rates are substantially higher.”

If Hispanic voters continue to make up more of the electorate than White voters without college degrees — a group that preferred Biden by 25 points gaining and a group that preferred Trump by 25 points declining — there are certainly some straightforward assumptions one might make.

The other thing is that Bidens numbers have been improving so much that they are swamping the Republican efforts to swamp the Aggregate sites

Biden Gains 4 in NYT Poll - More data now showing a changing election, one getting much better for Joe Biden and the Democrats. A new NYT poll has Biden going from down 5 to down 1, 46-45 - a 4 point gain! This encouraging movement is consistent with many other polls we’ve seen in recent weeks. The election today is close and competitive. Trump no longer leads, and things are moving in our direction.

The analysis of the poll is also consistent with the argument I’ve been making about what was likely to happen this spring - once the general began, and the Biden campaign turned on, some of our wandering coalition would begin to come home and Biden’s numbers would go up. Here’s a few excerpts from the NYT analysis of its poll:

the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president…..Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago…..

In the last month, Mr. Biden’s support among white voters remained flat, but it has inched upward among Black and Latino voters…….Mr. Biden was faring better than he had been a month ago in suburbs and among women……

The last few weeks have brought us lots of encouraging polling. Trump’s leads outside the margin of error have disappeared. Almost every poll national poll taken in recent weeks has the race within margin of error - meaning it’s close and competitive. 21 polls taken since late February have Biden ahead. Many polls have found meaningful movement towards Biden (he’s gained 4 points here, 6 points in Harris X for example). We’ve started seeing better numbers in the battleground states too, as there are now polls with Biden ahead in MI, PA, WI. We had 2 very encouraging polls in NC this week showing Biden within margin of error (tied). One Quinnipiac had Josh Stein up 52-44.

We have a long way to go in this election. Much will change, and we have a lot of work to do. But the election is changing now, becoming bluer, as many of us believed it would. Here at Hopium we celebrate the wins when they come and these last few weeks of polling have been very good for us. Congrats all - it’s encouraging stuff.

I urge you to subscribe to Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles. He is a seriously good antidote to the Media that is hyping up Trump to a stupid degree. Its good to get a positive vibe into your head to fight the clouds.

https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Legal AF analysis and biography of Aileen Cannon. Starts at 0:33.

[MN-Skeptic]

Josh Gerstein
@joshgerstein

JUST IN: Special counsel Smith urges Judge Cannon to reject Trump's latest bid for delay in classified docs case. "Each time the Court sets a new deadline in this case...the defendants reflexively ask for an adjournment. That must stop." Doc: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap ... .453.0.pdf

[RVInit]

Cannon will make it 3 years after..

She clearly has no intention of Donald Trump standing trial in this case. He clearly also is going to win the election, he has made shocking inroads with minority voters which is is more than enough to offset the handful of Republicans who won't vote for him.

He will not stand trial for anything aside from the hush money/election interference case because his AG will drop all cases against him with prejudice and that will be that. The average American voter is stupid enough to elect this giant bag of pus again.

We are doomed in this country.

Uh.. the "shocking inroads" are just the trends have have been happening with Republican voting for a while. He increased his Minority vote by 2 to 4 % past time and he still lost massivly. And that was just the fact that Minorities have been growing more republican by a factor of 2% every election in America. Why that is, is beyond my pay grade, but its been happening.

One article from 2021 talking about it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... out-surge/

► Show Spoiler

Since polls closed Nov. 3, there’s been a lot of focus on the extent to which Black and Hispanic voters seem to have been more open to President Donald Trump than they were in 2016. Preliminary exit polls showed Trump doing better with non-White voters than he had four years prior — a shift that certainly defies perceptions of Trump’s relationship with those communities.
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Sophisticated new analysis of the election results, combining polling data with a look at the voting records of millions of Americans, helps explain why that shift occurred and, more important, how it relates to the eventual outcome.

The data firm Catalist explored the 2020 electorate in a lengthy report published Monday. It breaks out the voter pool along several demographic lines, including race and education. In particular, the analysis splits up the White electorate into those with and without a college degree, a divide that emerged as essential in 2016 and 2018.

That yields a rough estimate of who turned out and how they voted that looks like this. The bars are scaled vertically relative to the percent of the electorate of each group. (Whites without college degrees were 44 percent of the electorate, for example.) The blue and red bars show the support for Joe Biden and Trump within the group. (Whites without degrees heavily preferred Trump.)

What should stand out on that chart is how White voters without college degrees are the only group that preferred Trump to Biden. Whites with degrees and Black, Hispanic and Asian (identified as AAPI: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) voters all preferred Biden to some degree.

One upshot is that Biden’s support was much more diverse than that of Trump. About 6-in-10 Biden voters were White, including a third who are White and have no college degree. More than half of Trump’s support came from that category alone, with 85 percent of his support coming from White voters overall.

This isn’t surprising, of course. The Democratic Party has consistently been more diverse than the Republican Party; it was actually more diverse 25 years ago than the GOP is now. But given the attention paid to Trump’s improvements with non-White voters, it’s important to point out that Biden got twice as much support from White voters without college degrees as Trump did from voters who weren’t White.

It’s also important to contextualize that shift to Trump with the overall change in the electorate. 2020 saw a decline in the density of White voters without college degrees relative to 2016 and 2012 before that, according to Catalist. The density of Hispanic voters increased, while the density of Black voters remained about the same, down from 2012 when President Barack Obama was seeking his second term. (We’ve excluded AAPI and other demographic groups from these charts for the sake of clarity.)

The level of support earned by Biden (measured as a share of votes for either the Democrat or the Republican since 2012) dropped among both Black and Hispanic voters while it increased substantially for Whites with college degrees and even ticked up slightly among White voters without a degree.

All of that focus on the declines obscures a key point elevated by Catalist: When combined with the increase in turnout, the net result was more votes for the Democrat.

If we roughly apply Catalist’s estimates for the density of each group to the number of votes cast in each election, you see that there were more voters in each group than there were in 2016. Yes, Whites without a college degree made up less of the electorate than four years prior, but turnout of those voters increased 10 percent.

Think about what that means. If in 2016 there were 1,000 Black voters who backed the Democrat by a 75-to-25-percent margin, that’s a net of 500 votes in favor of the Democrat. If the margin among Black voters drops to a 72-to-28-percent split but the number of voters increases to 1,200 — the Democrat nets 28 more votes. The divide between the Republican and the Democrat widens.

At some point, the increase in turnout wouldn’t be enough to offset a significant drop. That’s likely what happened with Hispanic voters: The drop in support was large enough that even with increased turnout, it meant a net loss of votes for Biden relative to 2016. The same pattern also probably worked against Biden with Whites who don’t have a college degree. Trump appears to have gained in his vote margin with those voters simply because of the increased turnout.

But among Black voters in particular, Catalist estimates that the increase in turnout was enough to not only offset the drop in the Democratic margin but, in fact, to win two key states. In Georgia, for example, 200,000 more Black voters cast ballots than in 2016 in a state Biden won by about 12,000 votes. In Arizona, an additional 30,000 Blacks voted, more than twice the state’s 10,000-vote difference.

There are two key questions that emerge. The first is who those new voters were. The second is what the long-term trend in non-White voting might be.

To answer the first question, Catalist estimates that about 14 percent of 2020 voters had never cast a ballot before. About that same number had never voted in a presidential race in their states before, meaning that they had either voted in 2018 or were casting new ballots in states to which they’d moved. (This comports with the finding that the density of new voters was higher in states that have seen bigger increases in their populations.) About two-thirds of those new voters were under the age of 30, reflecting to some extent young people who were able to vote for the first time.

That newer voters tended to be less densely White might also help explain the shift in Black and Hispanic vote margins since 2016.

“As with Latino voters,” the firm’s Yair Ghitza and Jonathan Robinson write, “it is plausible that new marginal voters entering the electorate for the first time naturally drove the overall support numbers slightly down, because these new voters are less ideological than longtime voters.”

This overlaps with analysis conducted by the firm Equis Labs. Its research found that Trump helped drive turnout particularly among more conservative Hispanic voters that helped him eat into Biden’s advantage. Its findings mirrored Catalist in another way, finding divergences among Hispanic voters depending on national origin.

Answering the second question — the one about the long-term trend — is far trickier. To some extent it depends on the ability of future candidates to inspire turnout in the way that Trump did in 2020 (both on the left and the right).

The Catalist data hints at one answer.

“[T]here are still major gains to be made in voter turnout writ large,” it reads. “This is particularly true among communities of color, where nonvoting rates are substantially higher.”

If Hispanic voters continue to make up more of the electorate than White voters without college degrees — a group that preferred Biden by 25 points gaining and a group that preferred Trump by 25 points declining — there are certainly some straightforward assumptions one might make.

The other thing is that Bidens numbers have been improving so much that they are swamping the Republican efforts to swamp the Aggregate sites

Biden Gains 4 in NYT Poll - More data now showing a changing election, one getting much better for Joe Biden and the Democrats. A new NYT poll has Biden going from down 5 to down 1, 46-45 - a 4 point gain! This encouraging movement is consistent with many other polls we’ve seen in recent weeks. The election today is close and competitive. Trump no longer leads, and things are moving in our direction.

The analysis of the poll is also consistent with the argument I’ve been making about what was likely to happen this spring - once the general began, and the Biden campaign turned on, some of our wandering coalition would begin to come home and Biden’s numbers would go up. Here’s a few excerpts from the NYT analysis of its poll:

the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president…..Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago…..

In the last month, Mr. Biden’s support among white voters remained flat, but it has inched upward among Black and Latino voters…….Mr. Biden was faring better than he had been a month ago in suburbs and among women……

The last few weeks have brought us lots of encouraging polling. Trump’s leads outside the margin of error have disappeared. Almost every poll national poll taken in recent weeks has the race within margin of error - meaning it’s close and competitive. 21 polls taken since late February have Biden ahead. Many polls have found meaningful movement towards Biden (he’s gained 4 points here, 6 points in Harris X for example). We’ve started seeing better numbers in the battleground states too, as there are now polls with Biden ahead in MI, PA, WI. We had 2 very encouraging polls in NC this week showing Biden within margin of error (tied). One Quinnipiac had Josh Stein up 52-44.

We have a long way to go in this election. Much will change, and we have a lot of work to do. But the election is changing now, becoming bluer, as many of us believed it would. Here at Hopium we celebrate the wins when they come and these last few weeks of polling have been very good for us. Congrats all - it’s encouraging stuff.

I urge you to subscribe to Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles. He is a seriously good antidote to the Media that is hyping up Trump to a stupid degree. Its good to get a positive vibe into your head to fight the clouds.

https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/

I appreciate the information. I tend to think there are an awful lot of wishful thinking out there - like the ones who thought the Supreme Court might uphold the Colorado decision to use their supposed "original intent" to do what the writers of the 14th amendment clearly intended, or the ones who thought he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell in 2016, or the ones who think there is a single judge who would entertain the idea of incarcerating Trump should he be found guilty of anything that anyone else would be incarcerated for.

But I will take a look at what you provided, and I appreciate the links and info. I do hope that I am wrong, but I really am afraid he is going to be elected President again. I think you might possibly have a higher opinion of the average American voter than is called for. Sadly.

[Suranis]

I appreciate the information. I tend to think there are an awful lot of wishful thinking out there - like the ones who thought the Supreme Court might uphold the Colorado decision to use their supposed "original intent" to do what the writers of the 14th amendment clearly intended, or the ones who thought he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell in 2016, or the ones who think there is a single judge who would entertain the idea of incarcerating Trump should he be found guilty of anything that anyone else would be incarcerated for.

But I will take a look at what you provided, and I appreciate the links and info. I do hope that I am wrong, but I really am afraid he is going to be elected President again. I think you might possibly have a higher opinion of the average American voter than is called for. Sadly.

Well, Simon Rosenberg was the one person who publicly said that the "Red Wave" narritive in 2022 was a complete load of BS, and the Polls simply did not show it at all.

Besides,. if you DONT listen to hopeful voices who back themselves up with evidence, you are going to be indulging in as much "hopeful thinking" as everyone else. You wont have balance. And people get addicted to the high of being afraid and outraged.

I mean come on, who out there in the media and online is actually doing a hopeful narrative? They are all running around screaming about every shitty poll that has Trump ahead. take a step back and look at it objectively and you will see you are getting a bit shellshocked by the doom and gloom from all directions. It's good for clicks.

I mean, if it does not work for click, why are you so doubtfull about clicking a positive link when you will click on negative ones without a second thought? Think about it.

[pipistrelle]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurk ... n-the-air/

TOPLINE Former President Donald Trump received another win on Monday in his bid to delay his criminal trial for allegedly mishandling White House documents, as U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely extended a key deadline in the case—the latest move by the judge to slow-walk the trial, which she has yet to set a new date for.

[RTH10260]

MTN Ben Meisela rants over Cannon in length, nothing really new

► Show Spoiler

[Dr. Ken]

[Dr. Ken]

[chancery]

This order is judge for "I don't know what I'm doing and the dog ate my homework."

Pathetic.

[raison de arizona]

Well, whose fault is it that the "various pending pre-trial motions" haven't been ruled on?

[chancery]

https://twitter.com/obarcala/status/178 ... 027797639

Owen Barcala
@obarcala

Smith: We ask the court to review these soon because there's not a lot of time before trial

Court: Too early

Smith: Seriously, now there's only a couple months

Court: Still too early

Smith: Only two weeks now!

Court: Whoops, too late! Indefinitely stayed

[realist]

https://twitter.com/obarcala/status/178 ... 027797639

Owen Barcala
@obarcala

Smith: We ask the court to review these soon because there's not a lot of time before trial

Court: Too early

Smith: Seriously, now there's only a couple months

Court: Still too early

Smith: Only two weeks now!

Court: Whoops, too late! Indefinitely stayed

[p0rtia]

#LITA

[chancery]

Back in March, andersweinstein linked to a gossipy but fascinating account of what's going on inside Cannon's chambers from a substack called Original Jurisdiction.
https://davidlat.substack.com/p/clerkin ... lerks-quit

It's based on mostly anonymous sources and is somewhat rambling but it's worth reading the whole thing, if only to understand the caveats expressed by the author, David Lat.

Lat is a former lawyer with a decent resume, albeit a short one: Harvard, Yale Law, court of appeals clerkship, three years at one of the best BigLaw litigation departments, 3 years as an assistant U.S. attorney. Lat's thoughts about what's going on with Cannon's behavior are of course speculative, but to me they seem plausible and offer a somewhat nuanced explanation for the train wreck of her management of the case.

In spring 2020, Aileen Mercedes Cannon was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as a district judge in the Southern District of Florida. She was relatively young, not even 40, as well as somewhat inexperienced to serve as a trial-court judge, with only four jury trials under her belt.

But she was well-regarded in the South Florida legal community. Her judicial career was off to a perfectly fine start. And her early law clerks had positive experiences. And then, in August 2022, she was assigned Trump v. United States—the civil case that former president Donald Trump filed against the federal government, challenging the seizure of documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate and seeking the appointment of a special master to review them.

In September 2022, Judge Cannon largely ruled in Trump’s favor, ordering the appointment of a special master. Her ruling was widely criticized, and in December 2022, she was unceremoniously reversed by the Eleventh Circuit. The opinion was issued per curiam (“by the court” and therefore unsigned), but the panel consisted of Chief Judge William Pryor—a leading conservative jurist and Trump Supreme Court shortlister—and two Trump appointees, Judges Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher.

What went wrong? Based on her academic credentials and what I’ve heard about her from mutual friends, I disagree with criticisms of her as unintelligent; to the contrary, I believe she’s quite smart. But there’s a difference between intelligence and good judgment, and her ruling in Trump v. United States lacked the latter.

Many outsider observers dismiss Judge Cannon as a pro-Trump political hack. But sources of mine who know her personally push back on this, describing her as fair-minded and not particularly political. So while she definitely leans too far in Trump’s direction, giving dubious arguments from his legal team more consideration than they deserve, I think it’s oversimplifying matters to dismiss all her rulings as purely the product of “MAGA judging.” Instead, I’d suggest that in her handling of Trump v. United States, Judge Cannon thought like a pointy-headed appellate judge, not a commonsensical trial judge.1 A seasoned trial judge would have seen Trump’s request for a special master and quickly ruled, “Hell to the N-O.” Judge Cannon—a former appellate attorney, with limited trial experience—received Trump’s unorthodox request, identified novel legal issues, and thought to herself, “How interesting!”

Grossly overthinking the matter, Judge Cannon ultimately issued a weirdly clever, creative ruling, leading legal commentator Chris Geidner to dub her “Trump’s best lawyer in years.” But the opinion was too clever by half—and just plain wrong—which is why the Eleventh Circuit made short work of it.2

The Trump v. United States debacle seriously damaged Judge Cannon’s reputation—and it also created a clerk problem. An incoming clerk from a top-three school, worried about a Cannon clerkship being a drag on their résumé, withdrew from the clerkship shortly after the Eleventh Circuit smackdown.

[I've left out a good deal of the chronology of Cannon's clerks]

Fast forward to June 2023. Judge Cannon gets United States v. Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the ex-president for mishandling classified documents. It was a random assignment, meaning that the criminal case wasn’t given to her as a “related case” to Trump v. United States, the earlier civil case seeking the special master.

The documents case created immediate challenges for the Cannon chambers. It was a huge, high-profile prosecution, as well as a complex one, given the national-security issues. It generated a vast amount of additional work, and the chambers started to fall behind.

The documents case also required Judge Cannon’s three clerks to obtain security clearances, a consideration mentioned in yesterday’s post (update #13). One of the three clerks encountered delays in getting cleared, forcing the clerks who did have clearances to take on even more work—which they weren’t happy about. (A clerk without the requisite security clearance can’t work on the Trump case, but can work on other matters.)


As the months passed, the stress and workload increased in chambers. Judge Cannon became afflicted with an unfortunate combination of anxiety, from handling a matter of national importance, and insecurity, from never having run a case of this complexity. Understandably affected by all the pressure, the judge—whom her early clerks described as a wonderful mentor—started to change.

And not for the better. Here’s a January 2024 posting from the Top Law Schools (TLS) message board,3 describing Judge Cannon as a boss in the second half of 2023:

[G]enerally, she treats clerks (and the entire chambers staff) very poorly and tends to get angry to the point of screaming at them and talking to them in condescending ways. I know her courtroom deputy quit less than two years into the job.4

Expectation is basically that you don’t have a personal life during the clerkship and that work takes priority over anything else to the point that she controls what you do 24/7. This results in her micromanaging everything, and setting rules regarding when clerks are allowed to work on certain assignments, including an arbitrary rule that clerks can’t work on the daily filing for their cases (like drafting scheduling orders, orders granting motions for extension of times, etc.) until outside of in-office hours.

She frequently requires that clerks come into the office on weekends and federal holidays (including some major ones), even though she herself is there less than 1/4 of those days. And when she does require weekend or holiday work, she won’t let you know until last minute so if you bought a plane ticket, you’re out of luck. Even if she doesn’t mandate weekend work in the office, the deadlines she sets are so unrealistic that 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be working on a weekend just to turn in a not-great draft by the deadline (which only contributes to more yelling and screaming for it not being polished enough).

Average hours worked in a week are between 80-100, with 100+ hours a week not being uncommon. It’s definitely not a clerkship to take if you have a family

The Cannon clerkship experience wasn’t always like this. Pre-Trump Judge Cannon was comfortable delegating to her clerks, which a busy trial judge must be able to do (appropriately, of course, with adequate supervision). Post-Trump Judge Cannon, increasingly worried about how her work product would fare under increased public scrutiny, thought she could ensure quality by getting more “into the weeds”—but micromanaging actually made things worse, not better.
[omitted more discussion of turnover among clerks]

So now the Cannon chambers is fully staffed. But it’s premature to declare that everything is hunky-dory. Note these facts, against the backdrop of Judge Cannon having one of the most high-profile, politically charged, complex cases in the country:

-- Three out of her four clerks have been with Judge Cannon for six months or less.

-- Only one of the current clerks, the clerk who started in August 2023, is there according to plan.

--- None of these clerks was in chambers in June 2023, when the Trump documents case arrived, i.e., they’ve all had to play catchup.


”I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify something I mentioned on Advisory Opinions: as I have previously written on multiple occasions, I do think Judge Cannon has some level of bias in favor of Trump, conscious or unconscious. Her opinion appointing a special master in the original civil case was so far off the map that it’s hard to explain otherwise, and some of her rulings in the current criminal case have taken a scolding tone toward Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team.

But I would add—quoting from my prior post, emphases added—that ‘it’s oversimplifying matters to dismiss all her rulings as purely the product of MAGA judging.’ Rather, I think that there are additional factors contributing to some of the weird rulings and frustrating delays in the case, including her lack of experience managing complex trials, her thinking too much like an appellate rather than trial judge, and problems managing her chambers. So yes, she has a pro-Trump bias—but to what degree, and to what extent it’s affecting her handling of the Trump documents case, can be debated.”

[chancery]

Another take:

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/statu ... 544660807

Asha Rangappa
@AshaRangappa_
I think that Judge Cannon is intellectually out of her league and is having some weird analysis paralysis because her personal partisanship makes her place Trump’s bizarre arguments (like that nuclear secrets are his personal records) on par with Smith’s *actual* legal arguments. She’s afraid of making any mistake, lest Smith have a basis to appeal and perhaps get her removed, and so in this lost, ineffective, and paranoid state, the best she can hope for is that Trump gets elected and the case just goes away. So that’s her play.

[raison de arizona]

Lat’s take is fascinating, thank you Anders for sharing and thank you chancery for highlighting.