Judge Aileen Cannon delivered an absolutely insane ruling on Monday evening as part of her jury instructions to both federal prosecutors and Trump’s legal team. The ruling says that members of the jury have to be given access to the highly sensitive classified documents that were uncovered at Mar-a-Lago – and if Jack Smith doesn’t allow that, then they jury will be instructed to assume that they were all personal documents that rightfully belonged to Donald Trump. This puts prosecutors in a horrible position, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday evening handed down a ruling, basically what was supposed to be instructions for the jury, but Aileen Cannon’s instructions, I guess we’ll call them, were so bad and so misguided that legal experts have literally been calling this insane. So here is what happened. As part of her jury instructions to both federal prosecutors and Donald Trump’s team, which for the record, she’s supposed to be asking them for their jury instructions, which she did do, but she went ahead and included some of her own, and she essentially gave Jack Smith an ultimatum. And that ultimatum is this. And this is of course what legal experts say is absolutely insane. She says, Jack Smith, you either one, have to show the jury all of these classified documents that Donald Trump had, these highly sensitive national security documents that they do not have the clearance to see.
You either have to show ’em or the jury will have to assume that these were actually personal documents from Donald Trump, which basically means we have no case. So make your choice, Jack Smith. Either you instruct the court to knowingly give top secret documents to people without security clearances or essentially Donald Trump goes free. Let me read you this. Cannon’s evening order alerted federal prosecutors and Trump’s legal team that they, quote, must engage with the following competing scenarios when considering whether Trump can be charged with unauthorized possession, either a jury is permitted to examine every record a former president swipes and claims as personal to determine whether it is or jurors must be told that, quote, a president has sole authority to categorize records as personal or presidential during his or her presidency.
So Cannon says you have to basically tell these jurors that they have to assume these are just his personal documents if you’re not willing to show them to them, because again, they don’t have security clearances. At this point Jack Smith has no choice. He’s got two choices, but the first one, the most obvious one, he has to go to the Court of Appeals and basically tell them she’s insane. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s literally rigging the trial, trying to rig the jury for Donald Trump, unless I disclose highly classified intelligence to commoners. Like, no, remove her from the case. He already has a mountain of evidence that he could use to get her removed from the case. Like that is not questionable. But this, even just this alone without the other evidence should be more than enough to get her thrown off the case.
And to be honest, if Democrats win this election, you know, retain the Senate and take back the House, I think this lady needs to be impeached. They have the authority to impeach her. She’s a federal judge. I think that needs to happen because she has grossly abused her power at this point. No question about it. This is an abuse of power. She’s doing it to protect Donald Trump. She’s bastardizing the justice system and she does not deserve to be on a federal bench anywhere. She doesn’t even deserve to be on a park bench at this point. That’s how bad she is. And then somehow she managed to make it worse. Cannon goes on to say that the Presidential Records Act is unclear about how to allow a president to make that kind of determination. You know, whether it’s presidential, or his personal. Even though ironically, the 1978 law was passed in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal as a means to ensure that White House records are considered US government property that should be overseen by responsible historians and librarians at the National Archives.
In her ruling, she wrote, quote, although there is no formal means in the Presidential Records Act, by which a president is to make that categorization, an outgoing president’s decision to exclude what he or she considers to be personal records from Presidential records transmitted to the National Archives and Records administrations constitutes a President’s categorization of those records as personal under the PRA. Except it literally doesn’t do that. There’s clear guidelines. She is now lying about what the Presidential Records Act says. That, by the way, is where the impeachment comes in. Either she’s too stupid to know what the law says, or she’s intentionally lying in her jury instructions to benefit Donald Trump. It’s like, he Smith, if you do not immediately request for her to be removed from the case, then you’ve lost.
Now, I did say there were two possible options, of course, going to the appellate court, asking for her to be dismissed. That’s option number one. And that’s the best option. That’s what you should do. But if you’re worried about showing classified documents to again, commoners, we’re not allowed to see them, then there’s something real easy we can do about that. Right? You’re at the DOJ. Why don’t you make a call to Merrick Garland? Tell him to make a call to President Biden. Tell him to go ahead and declassify all these documents right now. Then you got nothing to worry about. You know, kind of pull a one up on Judge Cannon and say, okay, you’re gonna try to call me. I’m calling your bluff. Here you go. You could do that. That would be the hilarious thing to do. But the legally responsible thing for you to do right now is to get Judge Cannon off that case immediately.
