MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes had harsh words on Tuesday for federal Judge Aileen Cannon one day after her highly controversial ruling to appoint a special master to oversee the documents seized when the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.
"It has been about 32 hours since a Trump-appointed federal district judge issued this astonishing ruling, essentially siding with Donald Trump and his lawyers, giving the ex-president nearly everything he wanted and more in the case of his clearly unlawful and possibly criminal retention of classified documents that are not his," Hayes said. "Now, we will get to the details of the ruling itself, but first, it is notable that this decision has come under unbelievable, overwhelming and near-universal criticism."
Hayes quoted from a New York Times article titled, "‘Deeply Problematic’: Experts Question Judge’s Intervention in Trump Inquiry."
"You wonder how a ruling went so catastrophically wrong to invoke reactions like that from some pretty serious folks," Hayes said. "One theory of how we came here is essentially the Trump view of the situation. The ex-president has made it very clear that he believes that judges he appoints should work on his behalf rather than on behalf of the law. As president, he had a habit of calling them my judges and crying those appointed from his predecessors as, 'Obama judges.'"
"It's so egregious in part because in the past, Trump's reliance on his people, his judges, has failed. A bunch of Trump-appointed judges threw out his bogus legal challenges in the 2020 election," Hayes noted. "We also know that according to testimony from counsel of the former Vice President Mike Pence, a coup plotter, John Eastman, was telling people that conservative justices on the Supreme Court would essentially clear a path for the coup to take hold. Eastman was in touch with Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas."
Hayes said, "it is clear that many people in Trump's inner circle and Tump himself believed fully, despite the evidence to the contrary of the election litigation, that the judges appointed would act essentially as MAGA collaborators in robes.'
Hayes then focused on Judge Cannon.
"She's got an unremarkable resume for a conservative judge. She is a lifelong member of the conservative Federalist Society -- a few years at a private law firm -- she has not been on the bench for very long. She was approved, this is interesting, by the McConnell Republican Senate, get this, in the lame duck period after the 2020 election. This is when Joe Biden was president-elect but Donald Trump was still actively trying to foment a coup."
He talked about how things could've gone disastrously wrong after the 2020 election.
"If there are five Ginni Thomas's or Aileen Canyons on the Supreme Court, it's entirely possible that Trump would have gotten away with his attempted coup," Hayes said.
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