Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is clearly doing her job for an audience of one these days, and you get one guess who that is. Cannon did her real boss, President Donald Trump, a super solid on Monday, blocking the release of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago case. In doing so, she appears to have bought the Trump team’s legal argument that it was somehow unlawful for Smith to even prepare the report after Cannon dismissed the charges against Trump. Yes, you read that right. In the Mar-a-Lago case, where the then-former president of the United States absconded with hundreds of classified documents, stashed them in his gilded bathroom, had his people lie to the FBI about it, and refused to return them, the real bad actor is Smith.  What was Smith’s transgression, exactly? Writing the special counsel report on the Mar-a-Lago investigation, a thing he was required to write under Department of Justice regulations.  But you see, Smith was a villain for doing that because Cannon felt it defied the new rule she invented, one which determined special counsels were super-illegal. Well, special counsels investigating Trump, let’s be honest. Part of why slamming Smith for doing this is ridiculous is that Cannon seems to think that her ruling, as a lowly lower court judge, somehow definitively ended Smith’s job.  Smith, of course, appealed her decision, but that got resolved not because anyone agreed with Cannon, but because Trump’s fully captured DOJ dropped the appeal after Trump won in 2024. 

Cannon also curiously decided Trump’s demand for keeping Smith’s report secret forever was “unopposed” because Trump’s pet DOJ didn’t oppose it. This conveniently overlooks that, for over a year, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute had been attempting to intervene in the case to compel the release of the report. Cannon dithered so long on even ruling that the groups had to go to the 11th Circuit last November to ask them to make Cannon rule. The 11th Circuit agreed, requiring Cannon to rule in 60 days, a thing she just straight-up ignored. However, she did helpfully—and swiftly—rule to allow Trump to participate and demand that the report be kept secret. 

Trump-appointed judicial activist Aileen Cannon protects 34x Felon-in-Chief’s crimes by blocking the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the lawless classified document theft by at Mar-A-Lago.

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: Judge Blocks Release Of Jack Smith's Report On Trump Classified Documents Case

NCRM:Judge Cannon Permanently Blocks Release of Jack Smith Classified Docs Report

Gary Grumbach and Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News:

The Justice Department has issued a legal opinion arguing that President Donald Trump does not have to turn over his presidential records to the National Archives at the end of his administration. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires presidential documents be sent to the National Archives and Records Administration. In an opinion released Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found the law “is unconstitutional for two independent but interlocking reasons.” It exceeds Congress' powers and it does so at the expense of the autonomy of the presidency, T. Elliot Gaiser wrote in the opinion, noting that Congress can’t order the papers of Supreme Court justices to be sent to the archives.

The president “need not further comply with its dictates.” If the Trump administration chooses to follow the opinion from the office, which offers legal advice to the executive branch but does not set law, he could face outside legal challenges should he violate the Presidential Records Act in the future. The determination is a signal that the president will not turn over his documents to the archives. Trump was accused violating the Presidential Records Act by refusing to turn over documents he kept after leaving office following his first term.

According to federal prosecutors, Trump willfully retained national defense documents at his private home in Mar-a-Lago, obstructed justice and concealed materials, including a classified military map reportedly shown to unauthorized individuals. The case was dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon in 2024 before he won re-election. [...]

Trump has long argued he did nothing wrong. Shortly after he took office, he dismissed the head of the National Archives, following through on a vow to change the leadership atop the agency, which was involved in the criminal case against him. [...]

The Presidential Records Act, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 following the Watergate scandal, requires official records of the president and vice president, created or received after January 1981, to be made public, and for the National Archives to manage a president’s records after the individual leaves office. The act requires that the president “take all practical steps” to keep presidential records separate from personal records, and it allows the president — once the archivist weighs in — to dispose of records that no longer have “administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value.” The act also states that presidential records are automatically transferred into the legal custody of the archivist as soon as the president leaves office.

The US Department of Injustice says that lawless criminal and document thief Donald Trump doesn’t have to follow the law regarding the mandatory transferring over his presidential records to the National Archives at the end of his administration.

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Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

It finally happened. Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been telegraphing for months that she was committed to finding a way to get Trump off the hook in his classified documents case, came through for her guy. In a sprawling 93-page opinion, Cannon threw out the charges against the former president, agreeing with Trump that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.  Since Trump stuffed the federal judiciary full of Federalist Society true believers, those courts are nothing but Calvinball. There are no longer any fixed rules and precedent doesn’t matter. What does matter to judges like Cannon is ensuring that a hard-right evangelical worldview becomes the rule of law in America and that Donald Trump is preserved at all costs. 

Cannon’s opinion is a joke

There’s little to no legal support for Cannon’s decision. In short, her ruling turns on the assertion that a special counsel is a “principal,” not an “inferior” officer. The former are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate — basically the same as cabinet appointments. Inferior officers generally have the same confirmation requirements unless Congress has authorized a head of a cabinet department to make the appointment. In that instance, Senate confirmation isn’t necessary.  The notion that the head of the Department of Justice can appoint special counsels as needed has been settled since the Watergate era. Indeed, if Senate confirmation were always required, special counsel appointments would become nearly impossible, as the Senate is basically non-functional thanks to the filibuster. Additionally, under Cannon’s view, if the Senate is held by the party in opposition to the current occupant of the White House, they essentially get a veto over every special counsel nomination.

The argument that special counsel appointments are unconstitutional if it makes Republicans sad has been pushed by conservative litigants who wanted to block Robert Mueller from investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. As Quinta Jurecic noted at Lawfare, when the DC Circuit issued its appellate opinion in 2019, four other federal courts had already considered the matter, agreeing that the special counsel’s appointment was proper.  The architect of this anti-special counsel argument is Stephen Calebresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society. Calebresi has shopped it around quite a bit, with major law review articles in 2018 and 2019 arguing Mueller’s appointment was improper and an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Trump’s presidential immunity case.  Recall that Cannon’s decision to entertain the Trump appointments clause argument led to an extremely odd hearing where Cannon allowed amici — outside third parties like Calebresi — to present arguments in favor of Trump’s position. That’s a highly unusual step and telegraphed either that Cannon didn’t know what she was doing, was deliberately to bolster her inevitable decision in favor of Trump, or both. 

[...] Not content to deal with the case at hand, Cannon also decided she should go back to the 1980s and retroactively declare that the appointment of Lawrence Walsh, who investigated the Reagan Administration’s role in the Iran-Contra affair, was invalid. So, too, with Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 election. The constitutionality of Mueller’s appointment had already been addressed by a federal appellate court five years ago when the DC Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Mueller’s appointment. However, yesterday’s opinion is very clearly Cannon’s job interview with Trump, and she’s writing this for an audience of precisely on person, so why not throw Trump some red meat about Mueller as well? Having disposed of decades of special counsel law, Cannon wasn’t left with much in the way of precedent. Perhaps that’s why she had to lean hard on Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in the presidential immunity case to reach her preferred conclusion. 

[...] Special counsel Jack Smith has already indicated that the DOJ will be appealing the dismissal to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Recall that the Eleventh Circuit overturned Cannon's previous ruling in this matter. Cannon granted Trump’s request that a special master review all the classified material Trump absconded with, which dragged the case to a halt. The Eleventh Circuit was not happy with this, saying, “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.” And this is the core of the problem: People like Aileen Cannon are perfectly happy with a rule that only applies to Donald Trump. Indeed, Cannon’s order already states that “the effect of this Order is confined to this proceeding.” Those of us who lived through the 2000 Bush-Gore recount case will recall that the Supreme Court tried to create a similar firewall between their bad and self-serving ruling and the possibility it might ever be used against Republicans instead of just Democrats. In Bush v. Gore, when handing the presidency to George W. Bush, the Court wrote that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” See? Calvinball. The giveaway of the presidency to George W. Bush only applies to George W. Bush. The destruction of the special counsel process only applies to Donald Trump. If Republicans need either of these issues to go the other way in a court of law, they just have to point to Cannon’s language limiting it to this instance only.  Cannon’s timing, whether a product of her overall incompetence or a deliberate choice, is exceedingly favorable for Trump. Even if Smith prevails in the Eleventh Circuit, Trump could petition his pet Supreme Court justices to review the case. No matter what, the case is DOA before the election. The process of an appeal, the result of which would ultimately only be to send the case back down for trial, will drag long past the election.

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

Email communications from individuals associated with the Trump campaign have been hacked by malign actors within the last ten days, Popular Information has confirmed.  On September 18, I was sent a message from "Robert," which contained the cover page of a dossier on Senator JD Vance (R-OH), the Republican vice presidential nominee, dated February 23, 2024. Robert refused to identify himself except to suggest it was the same "Robert" who provided stolen internal Trump campaign materials to Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post in July and August. "I thought you must have heard Robert's story," he said. Robert eventually sent me a 271-page Vance dossier, along with similar dossiers on two other potential Donald Trump running mates —  a 382-page document on North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (R), dated March 2, 2024, and a 550-page document on Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), dated April 1, 2024. All of the dossiers were marked "Privileged & Confidential."

Robert boasted that he had "a lot" of other Trump campaign materials. He sent me a dozen purported emails to and from top Trump campaign staff, including senior advisor Susie Wiles, senior advisor Dan Scavino, and pollster John McLaughlin. The emails covered an 11-month period, from October 2023 to August 2024. 

Robert also sent a 4-page letter, dated September 15, 2024, from an attorney representing Trump to three individuals at the New York Times. The letter has not been made public by either the Trump campaign or the paper. I provided a copy of the letter to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor, who confirmed its authenticity with someone at the New York Times who had seen it. (Smith has published a piece about the incident on Semafor.)  The legitimacy of the letter proves that the person or people representing themselves as Robert has stolen electronic communications from people associated with the Trump campaign within the last ten days.

Who or what is "Robert"? A threat analysis published by Microsoft on August 9 reported that "[i]n June 2024, Mint Sandstorm—a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit—sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor." On August 10, the Trump campaign said it was the victim of a hack by a foreign actor, citing the Microsoft report.  Three U.S. intelligence agencies have released joint statements, on August 18 and September 19, warning of "Iranian malicious cyber actors" who have obtained "stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign." Iran has denied any role in the hack. Popular Information will not publish or excerpt the Trump campaign materials provided by Robert. The materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.  I believe that, in some circumstances, the publication of leaked materials can be justified. The Pentagon Papers, for example, were obtained illegally by Daniel Ellsberg, but the public interest in revealing the truth about the Vietnam War outweighed those concerns. 

[...]

My personal emails were weaponized by the media and the Trump campaign in 2016

In 2016, Russian hackers were able to access years of emails from the personal account of John Podesta, who was serving as Hillary Clinton's campaign chair. I started working for Podesta in 2001, when I was a first-year law student at Georgetown. By the 2016 election, Podesta had been a colleague and friend for 15 years. So the materials obtained by Russian hackers and published by Wikileaks included correspondence between me and Podesta. 

Media organizations, including the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the National Review, and others, isolated a handful of my private emails to Podesta and used them as grist for articles that attacked my integrity and professionalism. I believe these insinuations were unfounded, but I was forced to defend my reputation in the media and with my colleagues at ThinkProgress, where I worked before starting this newsletter.  I was a bit player in this drama, but it is still disturbing to have your private communications stolen by a foreign government and broadcast by major media outlets.  As Popular Information previously reported, outlets like Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times produced dozens of unflattering articles and blog posts about Podesta's emails. 

[...]

There were a few tidbits of news buried in Podesta's emails, but no significant scandal. Most of the coverage amounted to little more than voyeurism. A Politico "live blog" of Podesta's stolen emails had more than 50 entries published over three weeks. "All the Juiciest Dirt in The Podesta E-mails, Explained," Vanity Fair headlined a November 3, 2016 article that was representative of the coverage. Unlike the Trump campaign materials from "Robert," Podesta's emails were posted online by Wikileaks. But the media played a critical role in amplifying the material and turning a collection of mostly anodyne emails into an ongoing scandal. The media also did not verify the authenticity of the hacked materials. The Clinton campaign declined to review 50,000 emails and contest or validate each one. The New York Times and others interpreted that as proof that they were all legitimate.  The coverage lasted for weeks because the stolen emails were released by Wikileaks in small batches. Each time a new batch of emails was released, the media swung into action, mining the stolen materials for any morsel that could be used in a story. There appeared to be little concern that both the content and cadence of political coverage at a critical juncture of the election was being dictated by foreign actors. 

The New York Times published at least 199 articles about the stolen emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day. The New York Times Editorial Board wrote that any negative impact their coverage had on the Clinton campaign was Hillary Clinton's fault for not voluntarily releasing the information contained in the stolen emails. "Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release," the New York Times Editorial Board wrote on October 22, 2016. "[E]veryone would have long since moved on." The media frenzy over Podesta's emails was actively encouraged by Trump and his campaign. On July 26, 2016, Trump publicly implored Russia to acquire Clinton's internal emails, promising that the media would amplify them. "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said. (It was later revealed that Russia began targeting Clinton campaign officials "on or around" the same day.)  When Wikileaks began posting the emails acquired by Russian hackers, Trump celebrated. He publicly mentioned WikiLeaks 141 times in the month before the election. "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks," Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania on October 10, 2016. 

Josh Kovensky at TPM:

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for the Southern District of Florida dismissed the Mar-a-Lago records case against Donald Trump on Monday. Per the order, Cannon dismissed the case after finding that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution. Cannon’s determination that Smith was unlawfully appointed effectively endorses a legal theory tested multiple times in previous cases and dismissed, rooted in the idea that the Attorney General cannot appoint and fund a special counsel absent authorization from Congress. That was seen as an absurd notion, and one contravened by decades of special counsel investigations under the current statute.

But it received a boost both after Cannon held a multi-day hearing on the question and after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas supported the idea in a concurrence in the Trump immunity ruling. Cannon cited that concurrence throughout her order. The immediate effect of the dismissal will be to end what was seen as the simplest and most threatening of the criminal cases against Trump. Trump’s decision to retain classified records after the government repeatedly asked for them to be returned took place nearly entirely after he left office, and purportedly imperiled some of the most sensitive national security information the government possesses.

The outright dismissal will allow Smith to appeal Cannon’s ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Until Monday, Cannon had mostly ruled in ways that deprived the parties of the ability to appeal, effectively delaying any potential trial until after the November election.

The ruling caps more than a year of stunning decisions from Cannon, beginning in the investigation’s pre-indictment phase. Then, Cannon broke with fundamental principles of criminal law to order a halt to the investigation after Trump filed a civil suit seeking the same. [...] In this case, Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case by finding that Smith was unlawfully appointed reads more like an appellate – or Supreme Court – ruling than that of a district court judge, typically charged with applying existing precedent. Cannon’s ruling both nakedly benefits Trump and contravenes rulings issued by other conservative judges. Hunter Biden, for example, moved to dismiss the gun charges against him by arguing that Special Counsel David Weiss was improperly appointed. The judge in that case, a Trump appointee, rejected the motion. It’s one of many examples in which other judges – even of the same ideological stripe – rejected the legal theory that Cannon endorsed on Monday.

Right-wing Trump-appointed judicial activist Aileen Cannon issued a ruling today in United States v. Trump dismissing the Jack Smith Special Counsel investigation regarding the classified document theft and Espionage Act violations. It is repulsive that Trump is allowed to get away with committing blatant document theft at Mar-A-Lago.

Smith is expected to appeal the ruling to the 11th Circuit Court.

See Also:

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos:

In an interview Sunday with the Washington Examiner, Donald Trump said he is rewriting his upcoming acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention because of Saturday’s assassination attempt. He’ll be going for unity this time, he promised. “This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said. Before that, it “was going to be a humdinger” and “one of the most incredible speeches” against Biden and his policies ever. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.” Sure, Donald. Here he is reacting to the dismissal of the classified documents case by district Judge Aileen Cannon.

[As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!]

Feel the unity. We’ve seen Trump’s idea of “unity,” from the very beginning with his “American Carnage” inaugural address, a dark and ominous speech declaring: “From this moment on, it's going to be America First.” In his America, “A new national pride will stir our souls, lift our sights and heal our divisions.” As long as you’re on his side.

Party Of “Law & Order”??? 🤣

The Republican Party has long claimed to be the party of “law and order”.  I have a little problem with that claim, given their behaviour and rhetoric of late.  Let’s take a look at just a few of the reasons I think it is a joke that they still attempt to lay claim to that title. The biggest threat to law and order today is posed by people toting guns, by guns in the hands of people who should…