The Department of Justice is setting up President Donald Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to hear Trump revenge cases, according to a former U.S. attorney.
The Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s office is reportedly ramping up the revenge prosecutions in a "mass investigation" and targeting Trump enemies, even eyeing cases against former President Barack Obama and former CIA Director John Brennan, MSNBC reported Tuesday.
The move has prompted several resignations, including two prosecutors, who stepped down from their jobs following an impromptu meeting Monday where they were ordered “to take part in a vast ‘conspiracy’ investigation into former intelligence and law enforcement officials.”
"At least one of them was asked to do something that was outside of their realm of comfortability and they believed would violate their ethical responsibilities," MSNBC senior White House reporter Vaughn Hillyard reported.
More than 30 subpoenas were issued on Friday by the DOJ, which reportedly “bypassed what multiple legal experts told MSNBC is standard protocol for its issuance of subpoenas, turning to a member of leadership to sign off on some of them, instead of a line prosecutor assigned to investigate the case.”
But there is another uncommon move.
"Typically, you would expect the line prosecutors who are handling the case to be the people who would sign subpoenas," legal analyst and former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade told MSNBC.
"It sounds, though, like this is some sort of special project that they're putting together, some sort of special unit. Executive U.S. attorneys sometimes have in their portfolio special projects. So it sounds to me like this executive U.S. attorney is going to be leading whatever this effort is into this conspiracy investigation. But I do think it's noteworthy that this is not being handled the way a routine case would be handled for a violation of the law. Instead, it is being handled as a special case with a high-level executive member of the team handling this," she added.
The location of the case is also raising questions and concerns.
"The other thing that I thought was noteworthy about the reporting is that the grand jury to be impaneled is going to be in Fort Pierce, Florida. That, of course, is the district that the portion of the district, the southern district of Florida, that has one and only one judge, and that judge is Aileen Cannon. I don't know that we should be suspicious of everything Judge Aileen Cannon does, but we do know that her track record in the Mar-a-Lago case with the documents was first to impose some really extraordinary hoops for the prosecutors to go through at the time of the search," McQuade said.
"And then, of course, the dismissal of the case, finding the special counsel regulations to be unconstitutional, contrary to every other court that's looked at it. So I think there is reason to be very concerned about the irregularities that are occurring in this office," she said.
