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Cairn Horn88

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I think, and the law eagles can correct me if I'm wrong, but the case was just about could Trump be on the ballot for the primary. And the argument goes that the RNC can nominate whomever they want even if he engaged in an insurrection. Now who is going to stop him from being on the actual election ballot in November is a different question.

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31 minutes ago, HornOnTheBayou said:

I think, and the law eagles can correct me if I'm wrong, but the case was just about could Trump be on the ballot for the primary. And the argument goes that the RNC can nominate whomever they want even if he engaged in an insurrection. Now who is going to stop him from being on the actual election ballot in November is a different question.

Ahhhhh. So the plaintiffs will just refile for the general?

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30 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

Ahhhhh. So the plaintiffs will just refile for the general?

Yeah, there's no state action in a primary.  A party doesn't even have to hold a primary.

But it seems once we're talking Secretaries of State or other officials putting him on the ballot, looks like he'll initially be taken off, pending appeal.

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Listening to the oral argument in Trump’s gag order appeal to the circuit court on MSNBC on the way into work.  Their orange client will like their argument just as much as the court will hate it.

Using a technical legal term, Trump and his counsel are getting Uber Fucked. From the questioning, it seems highly unlikely that he’s going to win his appeal and get the gag order overturned.  You have a panel of two Obama appointees and one Biden appointee. So when Trump loses, even though it was because Doddard’s counsel have a really stupid argument and a horrible client who says threatening things and sics his army of regarded cult members on people he dislikes on the reg, they will trumpet that the mean Democratic judges are going after Trump.

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On 11/20/2023 at 9:35 AM, Gatorubet said:

Listening to the oral argument in Trump’s gag order appeal to the circuit court on MSNBC on the way into work.  Their orange client will like their argument just as much as the court will hate it.

Using a technical legal term, Trump and his counsel are getting Uber Fucked. From the questioning, it seems highly unlikely that he’s going to win his appeal and get the gag order overturned.  You have a panel of two Obama appointees and one Biden appointee. So when Trump loses, even though it was because Doddard’s counsel have a really stupid argument and a horrible client who says threatening things and sics his army of regarded cult members on people he dislikes on the reg, they will trumpet that the mean Democratic judges are going after Trump.

I didn't listen, but I have read some coverage.  I think the gag order will stay in place, but might be narrowed some.  The judges weren't buying Trump's argument completely, but I think they were a bit skeptical of the government's position in spots too.  Caveat, as always, with the difficulty of sussing a ruling from oral argument questions.

And, I don't put much stock in who appointed the judges.  Outside of Trump appointees, and a few outliers from GWB, most of them are just going to do the judge thing.

Some good discussion here. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/three-appellate-judges-two-hours-and-a-first-amendment-conundrum

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On a related note, perusing lawfare, which is a really fantastic source for things Trump and others, I came across this.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/m.-evan-corcoran-s-attorney-client-privilege-in-florida

It's a discussion of why the DC District Court's order piercing attorney-client privilege on the crime fraud exception may not bind, or even persuade Cannon (her proclivities aside).

For one thing, it's an order of another, co-equal district court.  I thought it had been fully appealed to the DC Circuit, but apparently not, they just declined to stay the order and did not hear a full appeal on the merits.  Even if the DC Circuit had, its ruling would not be binding on a court in the 11th Circuit, just highly persuasive.

But the main issue, according to the article, is that it's not the same party, so issue preclusion (res judicata species) does not apply.  I suppose that's technically true in that the witness was Corcoran, not Trump, but everything seemed to indicate that Trump's attorneys were there asserting his interest in the privilege, including the abortive appeal.  And, of course, the privilege is Trump's not Corcoran's to waive or otherwise lose.  That would seem to make him the "real party in interest" even if he wasn't technically the one before the grand jury or before the courts.

I am intrigued by this issue, because it seems like if Corcoran's notes and testimony are excluded from the MAL trial, the obstruction case gets a bit harder.  Maybe not with the separate DeOliveira/surveillance issue.

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1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

I didn't listen, but I have read some coverage.  I think the gag order will stay in place, but might be narrowed some.  The judges weren't buying Trump's argument completely, but I think they were a bit skeptical of the government's position in spots too.  Caveat, as always, with the difficulty of sussing a ruling from oral argument questions.

And, I don't put much stock in who appointed the judges.  Outside of Trump appointees, and a few outliers from GWB, most of them are just going to do the judge thing.

Some good discussion here. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/three-appellate-judges-two-hours-and-a-first-amendment-conundrum

My comment that he is fucked was really addressing the fact that I do not see the gist of the gag order being overturned. I could see them tweak it some.

Quote

She notes that  the Supreme Court’s conception of even the clear and present danger test is still that it is a balancing test that requires consideration of the weighty constitutional interest in protecting the integrity of a criminal trial as well as the First Amendment interests of the defendant. 

Sauer responds that Brown guarantees the defendant “absolute freedom” on core political speech.

“So there is no balance,” says Judge Millett. She adds that calling it “core political speech” begs the question of whether it is in fact political speech or whether it is speech “aimed at derailing or corrupting the criminal justice process.” Sauer responds that Trump’s campaign speech is “inextricably entwined” with freely responding to the entire election interference prosecution. 

Trumps lawyer may not have thought that answer through entirely. He is essentially arguing that you can corrupt the criminal justice process as long as you do it in a stump speech. I don’t think that is going to fly.

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7 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

My comment that he is fucked was really addressing the fact that I do not see the gist of the gag order being overturned. I could see them tweak it some.

Trumps lawyer may not have thought that answer through entirely. He is essentially arguing that you can corrupt the criminal justice process as long as you do it in a stump speech. I don’t think that is going to fly.

Agreed.  This incessant incantation of "core political speech" is not going to get them there.

One of the remarkable things, as usual, each side was given 20 minutes.  Somehow or other, Trump's side wound up lasting 70 minutes.  I didn't see what the government wound up getting, but the total was more than 2 hours.   Quite unusual.

For the peanut gallery, when you're doing oral argument, there's usually a pair of lights, green and red, up near the judges bench.  In the last few minutes, the red light starts blinking and when it turns full red, you usually stfu, but also answer any pending questions from the judges, they give you that.  Not sure how it bled into 70 minutes, but the judges obviously didn't do anything.

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Aileen Cannon is going to personally try and torpedo the Florida classified documents case by helping Trump slow-play the process past the election. If Trump wins, he'll shut that case down himself.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/22/aileen-cannon-trump-trial-slow-00128391

Quote

Judge Aileen Cannon seems to be in no hurry.

On paper, she has scheduled a trial to open next May in the case charging Donald Trump with hoarding national security secrets at Mar-a-Lago.

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In reality, she has run the pretrial process at a leisurely pace that will make a postponement almost inevitable, according to experts on criminal prosecutions related to classified information.

Delaying Trump’s trial until after the November election would have a momentous implication: It might mean the trial never happens at all. If Trump wins the election and the case is still pending, he’s expected to order the Justice Department to shut it down.

Even a shorter delay would be fraught: Pushing the trial into the summer or fall could run headlong into the Republican National Convention or the heart of the general election campaign.

For now, Cannon, a Trump-appointed federal district judge in Florida, is officially sticking with the May 20 trial date she announced four months ago. She even recently denied Trump’s bid to push it back. But in a series of more technical rulings, Cannon has postponed key pretrial deadlines, and she has added further slack into the schedule simply by taking her time to resolve some fairly straightforward matters.

“It could be seen as a stealth attempt to delay the ultimate trial date without actually announcing that yet,” said Brian Greer, a former Central Intelligence Agency attorney.

“There’s pretty much no chance they could go to trial on May 20 with the current schedule,” he added.

David Aaron, a former DOJ national security prosecutor, agreed, saying a May 20 trial is unlikely “unless a lot of discipline is imposed.”

Early delays in a complex case

The case would not be a simple one for any judge to manage. Trump is charged with retaining classified documents at his Florida estate after he left the White House and then impeding the government’s effort to retrieve the records. Because much of the evidence in the case is classified, a 1980 law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, governs how that evidence should be handled.

Most federal judges outside the Washington area rarely encounter CIPA cases, and Cannon isn’t known to have handled one before Trump’s. She has already lamented some of the practical complications surrounding this one. A facility to store classified information near the southern Florida courthouse she has designated for the trial isn’t expected to be ready until early next year, the judge said during a Nov. 1 hearing.

Other delays are more substantive. Last month, after prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith’s office ran into difficulties making a small amount of evidence in the case available to Trump and his lawyers due to what the government says is its extremely sensitive nature, Cannon suspended the deadlines for motions related to classified information.

She took more than five weeks to hold a hearing on Trump’s request for a new schedule and nine days more after that to issue a new one. And when she did finally set a new schedule, she put off the deadline for many pretrial motions by nearly 16 weeks.

“She’s certainly taken her time to litigate things,” Greer said.

Last week, prosecutors tried to jump-start the case by asking Cannon to give defense lawyers a Dec. 18 deadline to file most of their requests to use classified information at trial. The next day, before any of the defense attorneys had even responded, Cannon denied the request and said she doesn’t plan to set such a deadline until March 1.

“The signals are of a court that is proceeding slowly and methodically through the process,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former national security prosecutor who also was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. “In order to have a trial by May, the court would just need to push the parties on a tighter deadline.”

At a hearing earlier this month, Cannon said prosecutors pressing for a faster schedule in the case were being unrealistic about the complications involved.

“I’m just having a hard time seeing how realistically this work can be accomplished in this compressed period of time, given the realities that we’re facing,” Cannon said.

A clash of legal and political calendars

Cannon’s approach stands in stark contrast with her counterpart in Washington, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the other federal criminal case against Trump. (Trump faces separate state-level criminal charges in Georgia and New York.)

The case in Washington, involving Trump’s efforts to interfere with the 2020 election results, is scheduled for trial in March — and Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has seemed determined to stick with that timeline. She has repeatedly insisted that she will not, and cannot, consider Trump’s political schedule as she sets deadlines for the case.

Cannon, in contrast, has so far danced around the issue of whether Trump should get any deference in scheduling because of his status as a presidential candidate. But those questions may soon become impossible to dodge.

The classified documents trial is expected to last for weeks or longer. If the May 20 start date proves infeasible, the trial could risk overlapping with the Republican convention, set to open July 15 in Milwaukee.

“Could she try to squeeze it in before that? Maybe, but I doubt she’d do that,” Greer said.

Delaying it until August, September or October would open its own can of worms, assuming Trump wins the GOP nomination. The political stakes would be white hot, as Trump would be sidelined from the campaign trail to attend a trial on charges that carry decades of potential prison time.

But pushing the trial until after the election might be the most controversial move of all. It would set up the chance for Trump to avoid the trial altogether by winning the election, because as president he could appoint an attorney general willing to fire the special counsel and drop the charges. Trump might even be able to pardon himself.

Many Trump critics are already deeply skeptical of Cannon. Before he was even indicted, she sided with Trump on issues related to the materials that investigators seized from Mar-a-Lago. A federal appeals court quickly blocked part of Cannon’s order and later overturned the rest of it.

“Judge Cannon’s bias is showing over and over again,” former Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann wrote last week on X, formerly known as Twitter, declaring the judge to be “in the bag for Trump.”

Cannon is surely aware of the suspicion about her in some quarters. That has led some lawyers to conclude she may already know the trial is unlikely to start in May, but sees no reason at the moment to ignite the firestorm she would face if she puts it off.

Whatever Cannon’s motivations, there’s little dispute that she and prosecutors have very different views of the urgency of getting the case to trial.

“The Department of Justice is trying to do everything in its power ahead of trial to move as expeditiously as possible,” Van Grack said. “And the court is just reluctant to or resistant to any efforts to expedite the process.”

More delays on the horizon

Other significant pretrial showdowns are lurking in the case, all of which may cause further delays, attorneys warn.

One almost certain clash is over Trump’s plan to ask the judge to force prosecutors to gather more evidence that the defense thinks might be relevant to the case, like files from the National Archives and Records Administration, which manages presidential records. The Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s retention of classified records after his presidency kicked off after NARA notified the department that it was missing many records.

If any of that additional evidence is classified, the parties and the judge may have to go through multiple rounds of litigation about what portions can be used at the trial.

Another layer of complexity: Trump is not the only defendant in the case. His personal aide, Walter Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago facilities manager, Carlos de Oliveira, are also charged for allegedly helping Trump conceal the records and other evidence from investigators.

“With three defendants all having the opportunity to make motions, it could be that at least one of the defense teams decides to move to use a lot of classified information as evidence,” Aaron said.

Prosecutors are also likely to ask Cannon to allow special procedures at the trial itself, potentially proposing a procedure called the “silent witness rule” to try to admit some evidence without it being shown or read out in court. Sometimes witnesses testifying about classified matters even appear in disguise or are obscured from the public by a divider placed in the courtroom.

Trump, his co-defendants and members of the media will likely oppose such measures, leading to more litigation. This can put the government to a choice — sometimes called graymail — between making secrets public and abandoning a prosecution or part of it.

“There are valid reasons [to object] from a press perspective and a defense perspective, but it also does provide an opportunity for mischief by the defense as part of the graymail problem that CIPA is supposed to thwart,” Aaron said. “CIPA will thwart the graymail problem, but that does sometimes take time.”

 

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I would think that when the front runner for President of the United States is accused of a shitload of extremely serious crimes, it's probably best to get that trial squeezed in prior to the, you know, presidential election. That is still a year away. But hey, not a lawyer or judge.

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All those little random parties at the bottom of a presidential ballot.  Some of them just need 10k signatures in one state to get on a proper ballot.  In this digital age, you can have a targeted campaign to get that many signatures for less than $50k.  Which means you can’t be tried for a federal crime because you’re running for federal office.  And $50k is a fuckton less than it costs for good defense lawyers and appeal for attempting to overthrow the U.S. elections and government.  
 

this precedent gonna be fucking lit

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47 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Just the one law-dog, actually.

 

29 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

You guys always like to attribute positions to us that we never took or said.     Post a quote where I said that.  

Probably was just the one but I didn't want to mention his name.

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27 minutes ago, C-Man said:

 

Probably was just the one but I didn't want to mention his name.

Nor did I ever say such a thing. 

As acknowledged in the article, the case is turning into a furball because of all the classified shit.  Even a good unbiased judge would probably have trouble keeping this on track.  That said, she had the opportunity to move the trial date at Trump's request and declined to do so.

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16 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Agreed.  This incessant incantation of "core political speech" is not going to get them there.

One of the remarkable things, as usual, each side was given 20 minutes.  Somehow or other, Trump's side wound up lasting 70 minutes.  I didn't see what the government wound up getting, but the total was more than 2 hours.   Quite unusual.

For the peanut gallery, when you're doing oral argument, there's usually a pair of lights, green and red, up near the judges bench.  In the last few minutes, the red light starts blinking and when it turns full red, you usually stfu, but also answer any pending questions from the judges, they give you that.  Not sure how it bled into 70 minutes, but the judges obviously didn't do anything.

I listened to the whole to the whole thing.  It lasted that long because the judges (particularly the  women) grilled the fuck out of Trump’s lawyer (and the a lesser degree the state’s).  At one point she was literally reading word for word back to Trump’s lawyer one of the cases they cited and explaining to him how it doesn’t say what they claim it says.  

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It’s truly awesome, and it reflects exactly how Trumpworld thinks. I mean…asset valuation is literally ONLY about “numbers,” as a matter of law, but Trumpworld can just opt out of that….”I feel like it also has great value, magnificent value, the best value…a value of fliggety floogety.” We live in a post-reality, post-truth world. And it’s fucking insane.
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21 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Nor did I ever say such a thing. 

As acknowledged in the article, the case is turning into a furball because of all the classified shit.  Even a good unbiased judge would probably have trouble keeping this on track.  That said, she had the opportunity to move the trial date at Trump's request and declined to do so.

You say that like she can’t move his trial date in the future.

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1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Of course she can, but while we are wildly speculating, why don't we look at what is actually happening. 

Sure, let's look at her extensive pattern of behaving exactly like you would expect a Trump lackey whom he has paid off to behave, rather than a serious federal judge. You can't seriously think that it's "wild speculation" to think she'll delay the trial date. It's not like there's nothing to reasonably base that belief on.  

You seem to see it as your duty to defend her (apparently as the most laughably stupid and incompetent judge to ever sit the bench) since nobody else here will, and that's obviously up to you, but don't act as if there aren't many good reasons for intelligent people who know the legal profession (either as lawyers or more-than-casual observers) to think she's in the tank for Trump.

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46 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Sure, let's look at her extensive pattern of behaving exactly like you would expect a Trump lackey whom he has paid off to behave, rather than a serious federal judge. You can't seriously think that it's "wild speculation" to think she'll delay the trial date. It's not like there's nothing to reasonably base that belief on.  

You seem to see it as your duty to defend her (apparently as the most laughably stupid and incompetent judge to ever sit the bench) since nobody else here will, and that's obviously up to you, but don't act as if there aren't many good reasons for intelligent people who know the legal profession (either as lawyers or more-than-casual observers) to think she's in the tank for Trump.

Please stop shitting up the thread with this fuckery.

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