Judge Cannon's latest hearing has 'echoes' of last time she was reversed on appeal: expert
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is straying dangerously close to the old pro-Trump tactics that got her reprimanded by a higher court, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told MSNBC's Alicia Menendez on Friday evening.
This comes as Cannon held the first part of a hearing on whether special counsel Jack Smith was illegally appointed to run the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, a motion filed by former President Donald Trump's team that, as far as Kirschner is concerned, any reasonable judge would have thrown out long ago.
"Let's talk about today," said Menendez. "I am trying to square the fact that there did seem to be skepticism from Judge Aileen Cannon on the arguments from Team Trump, while, she grilled prosecutors about how closely Merrick Garland monitors the investigation. What does this mean to you?"
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"It sounded like a political talking point, not a matter of legal significance," said Kirschner, who has been a leading voice urging people to file complaints against Cannon to the appellate court. "It is legally irrelevant. Either the special counsel procedures are lawful and appropriate, and they are, as every court has ruled in recent years, or they are not."
"The first thing I thought of when I saw that she was, I believe, stepping the toe over the separation of powers line, by asking legally irrelevant questions that you can see how they may help Donald Trump paint the picture that somehow Merrick Garland and Joe Biden are more involved in his prosecution than they should be."
"This feels like when Judge Cannon got involved in the special master nonsense, which the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said, judge, you abused your judicial discretion by doing what you did because you had no right to interfere in an ongoing DOJ investigation, but she did it to the extreme advantage of Donald Trump," Kirschner added. "That has echoes of what we heard in the Florida courtroom where she probed how much interaction Jack Smith and Merrick Garland may be having."
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