'Makes no sense at all': Morning Joe blasts Judge Cannon's latest Trump order
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was gobsmacked by federal judge Aileen Cannon's latest order in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
The U.S. District Court judge ordered Donald Trump's attorneys and special counsel Jack Smith's team to submit jury instructions ahead of a trial, but the "Morning Joe" host agreed with legal experts who say the two-page order compels them to engage in an irrelevant application of the Presidential Records Act instead of the Espionage Act, which is the law he's charged with breaking.
"Wait, wait – that makes absolutely no sense at all, since it's not the law," Scarborough said. "As the Washington Postnotes, that second hypothetical would appear to be one in which Trump seemingly could not be convicted under almost any set of facts of improperly possessing classified documents. Well, it also just ignores what the Presidential Records Act has been defined as through the years. How can that be a jury instruction? I'm a bit confused."
That second scenario posed by Cannon in her order asserts a president “has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency, [and] neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision," but a former prosecutor said the judge had applied the wrong law.
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"It's not in terms of those two options, the answer should be none of the above," said Kristy Greenberg, former deputy chief of the Southern District of New York's criminal division. "He's not charged with anything relating to the Presidential Records Act. He is charged with committing violations of the Espionage Act. The jury instructions should track the language of that statute, which says you cannot, you know, possess, if you didn't have authorization to possess, national defense information. Nothing in the Presidential Records Act would have authorized him to possess national defense information after he was president. It's very simple, and she continues to try to muddy the waters."
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