Jack Smith's 'temper tantrum' filing shows he's 'had it' with Cannon: CNN analyst
Special counsel Jack Smith launched into a “prosecutorial temper tantrum” with a late-night filing blasting Judge Aileen Cannon for "fundamentally flawed” proposed jury instructions, CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig said Wednesday.
Smith's blistering court motion attacked Cannon’s order that lawyers prepare instructions in which jurors are asked to consider if classified documents taken by former President Donald Trump to his Mar-a-Lago home could be considered his personal property.
The special counsel didn’t hold back, telling Cannon her "legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction... that reflects that premise would distort the trial.”
“Jack Smith’s frustration really just jumps off the page,” Honig told CNN host John Berman. “That, by the way, classifies as a prosecutorial temper tantrum. I mean, usually prosecutors are very just the facts, very deferential to a judge. And here we see Jack Smith really expressing his frustration at the judge. The source of his frustration is that Judge Cannon has expressed a real willingness to entertain and perhaps introduce to the jury this defense that Donald Trump has raised based on the Presidential Records Act."
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He then explained why Smith had good reason to vent.
“And Jack Smith's response... basically boils down to it's a falsity as a matter of fact, this never happened," said Honig. "Trump never properly designated the documents. And, second of all, even if he had, it fails legally. So Jack Smith has had it and you can sense that in this brief."
Cannon’s proposed jury instructions — the directions that jurors are asked to consider after they’ve heard testimony and are about to begin deliberating — have been called bizarre by several legal experts.
They are based on Trump’s own opinion that the PRA allowed him to make government property his own. He used the argument to claim — so far unsuccessfully — that the trial against him should be dismissed.
"Trump's entire effort to rely on the PRA is not based on any facts," Smith wrote. "It is a post hoc justification that was concocted more than a year after he left the White House, and his invocation in this court of the PRA is not grounded in any decision he actually made during his presidency to designate as personal any of the records charge in the superseding indictment."
"During its exhaustive investigation, the government interviewed Trump's own PRA representatives and numerous high-ranking officials from the White House — chiefs of staff, White House counsel and senior members of the White House Counsel's Office. Not a single one had heard Trump say that he was designating records as personal or that, at the time he caused the transfer of boxes to Mar-a-Lago, he believed that his removal of records amounted to designating them as personal under the PRA."
Honig suggested that Smith’s furious reaction showed he might be considering asking for Cannon’s recusal in the case, which accuses the former president of illegally hoarding the documents.
“It's possible,” he said. “I think unlikely, but possible that if the judge rules against DOJ here, they may take that sort of extreme step of asking her to step aside.”
Read Jack Smith’s full filing at this link (PDF)
Watch the video below or at this link.