'Unjustifiably delayed': Expert snaps at Judge Aileen Cannon for dragging out Trump case

'Unjustifiably delayed': Expert snaps at Judge Aileen Cannon for dragging out Trump case
Photos: Creative commons and Jerry Lampen for AFP

Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann hit out at the handling of the classified documents case for Donald Trump Thursday, calling it "unjustifiably delayed."

Judge Aileen Cannon's slow-walking of the case — which is scheduled to start in May but has seen several delays — has been a complaint voiced by several legal analysts, who view it as a simple matter with plenty of case law to look to for guidance, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance argued on MSNBC. She predicted "fireworks" if Cannon, deviates from other similar cases.

And Weissmann agreed.

READ MORE: How Democrats could push back against GOP ‘judge shopping’

"The case that I think is really unjustifiably delayed is this one," Weissmann complained. "This is a case that is really quite simple in terms of its facts, in terms of preparation. Judge Cannon could have held this very routine hearing she held with the government — it could have been held months ago. There's been zero reason put on the record as to why she delayed."

He confessed to being cynical by nature, but he said that he gave her the benefit of the doubt at the start of the trial. Now, his patience has been tested to the extreme.

"I don't see any reason that this is taking as long as it did," Weissmann explained. "This is a very routine process to have these, what are called Section 4 hearings between the government and the judge as to what evidence can be used," he said, referring to a pre-trial hearing to discuss what classified information can be used as evidence which has taken a long time to be heard.

"I've been in those myself. I think this is one where there are a lot of excuses being given to her to continue the delay of the case. As you know, at the beginning of March, she's going to hear the parties on whether she's going to keep the May trial date. I think it's pretty forgone that that date is going to slip."

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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore into House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Friday's edition of MSNBC's "All In" for continuing to keep the House shuttered for business, accusing him of "surrendering" the authority of Congress to President Donald Trump.

Johnson continues to hold the House closed because he wants the Senate to vote on a clean resolution to open the government the Republican majority has already passed. However, some observers have also accused him of engineering the closure of Congress as a ploy to prevent any action on a bipartisan discharge petition to compel the White House to release the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files, which are expected to further embarrass President Donald Trump for his role in the scandal.

"I think I just saw that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has notified that next week will also be recess, which means I think that's a sixth, is that right?" said Hayes. "That's a sixth consecutive week that he's keeping the House out."

"Yeah," confirmed Raskin. "I mean, he has completely surrendered the legislative power of the people. This is the people's representatives. And so he's just lied, lying down and capitulating completely to Donald Trump and whatever he wants to do. It's a disgrace and an embarrassment that means he will go down in history as the worst speaker in the history of our country for doing this."

"But in any event, we've got emergency conditions in the country because, just like we need to restore food, and not just for November, but going forward, we need to restore the health care of the people," noted Raskin, referencing the shutdown standoff over extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are vanishing for millions of people.

"So we say to the Republicans, no, don't take a sixth week of paid vacation where you don't come to Washington, you don't come to your offices in the Rayburn Building or the Longworth Building or the Cannon Building, but you stay back home, but you're not even meeting with your constituents because you can't dare to face them because of the shame and the scandal of what the Republicans are doing to America right now," said Raskin.

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Bounty hunters are in line to become the next tool of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under a procurement document reviewed by the Intercept, the website reported Friday.

"Under the plan, bounty hunters may receive 'monetary bonuses' depending on how successfully they track down their targets — and how many immigrants they then report to ICE," the report said. "According to the document, which solicits information from interested contractors for a potentially forthcoming contract opportunity, companies hired by ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in 'increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.'"

ICE is seeking a high-tech, low-civil liberties operation.

"Contractors will surveil their target to confirm the accuracy of their home address, including 'time-stamped photographs of the location,' before reporting back to ICE. The vendor should prioritize the alien’s residence,” the document notes, “but failing that will attempt to verify place of employment.

"The plan entails not just on-the-ground monitoring, but the use of digital surveillance."

Additionally, "ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.”

On Bluesky, poster Russ commented, "ICE to hire bounty hunters to hunt migrants for cash. Texas hunts women for cash. The US government hunts people for cash. They aren't keeping people out. They are trapping us in."

Feralcrone1692 weighed in: "If I had a million dollars, I would offer rewards to locate ICE bounty hunters."

The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship.

The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.

According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated.

Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also recently expanded to include passport and visa information.

Incorporating driver’s license information would allow election officials whose rolls don’t include voters’ Social Security numbers to conduct bulk searches by driver’s license number. Ultimately, the system would link these two crucial identifiers for the purpose of citizenship checks, said Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It is the key that unlocks everything,” Morse said.

State driver’s license databases often include a variety of sensitive information on drivers, including place of birth, passport number, biometrics, address, email and employment information, said Claire Jeffrey, a spokesperson for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

Beyond the privacy concerns this creates, using driver’s license numbers in SAVE could lead to citizens being wrongly flagged as noncitizens, said Rachel Orey, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Driver’s license numbers are sometimes reused and people can have licenses in multiple states. Also, if SAVE isn’t linked to live versions of state driver’s license databases, the information in the system will be outdated.

“This could have far-reaching consequences for voter access and public trust if inaccurate data were used to question eligibility or citizenship,” Orey said.

DHS says in the notice that linking to driver’s license data, which it calls the most widely used form of identification, “will allow SAVE to match against other sources to verify immigration status and U.S. citizenship, which will improve accuracy and efficiency for SAVE user agencies.”

The department did not respond to questions about the expansion.

Up until this year, SAVE was mostly used to check individual immigrants’ citizenship status when they applied for public benefits. DHS has said the aim in expanding the system was to enable election officials to check voter rolls en masse. But the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration as well as Thursday’s disclosure make clear that DHS and other agencies can use SAVE for other purposes, including for immigration enforcement investigations.

Information uploaded into the system by state and local election officials and other users will be saved and may be “shared with other DHS Components that have a need to know of the information to carry out their national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, or other homeland security functions,” the notice explains.

Advocacy groups have sued the federal government claiming the pooling of data in SAVE violates the Privacy Act, which is meant to prevent misuse of private data. In filings, the government has said that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that DHS would exercise caution in flagging voters as potential noncitizens.

Some privacy lawyers called DHS’ move to add driver’s license information more evidence of federal overreach. “The administration wants to get as much data as it can, however it can, whenever it can,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

The DHS notice, known as a system of records notice, allows for public comment on several aspects of SAVE’s expansion, including some already completed. Typically, such notices are filed when agencies propose changes to federal systems, and the comments are meant to inform how officials go forward. That didn’t happen in this case.

In June, email records show, DHS asked the Texas Department of Public Safety, which issues driver’s licenses and ID cards, to partner on a pilot program to add its data into SAVE.

Timothy Benz of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE, wrote that the planned expansion was part of the “evolution” of SAVE into a “one-stop shop for all election agency verification needs.”

“That would require collaboration with each states’ DL agency in order for us to query those DL records in order to provide that information to the querying elections agency,” Benz wrote.

Rebekah Hibbs, a supervisor in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver’s license division, replied that DPS is “always happy” to support the SAVE tool and agreed to talk again with USCIS.

It’s not clear what happened next. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said the “department does not have any ongoing projects with USCIS related to driver record information for registered voters, nor have we been asked to provide that information.”

She did not answer questions about whether DPS has given any data to USCIS. DHS did not respond to questions about whether the partnership moved forward.

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Oct. 20 that her office had run the state’s entire voter roll through SAVE. Alicia Pierce, Nelson’s spokesperson, said the office did the check using full Social Security numbers, which it routinely obtains from the Department of Public Safety to match with registered voters.

The results showed that around 0.015% of Texas voters, or 2,724 people, are potentially noncitizens.

At least one Texas official is concerned that those initial SAVE results may not be accurate. In a court filing submitted Wednesday as part of the Privacy Act litigation, Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis wrote that state data shows about 25% of the voters that SAVE flagged as potential noncitizens in the county had provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

“I am concerned that the list Travis County received from the Secretary of State is flawed and worry about the potential for voters to be improperly cancelled from the voter rolls and possibly disenfranchised as a result,” Davis’ filing says.

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