Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University School of Law, said that if Cannon issues rulings that appear to favor Trump it could decrease public trust in the fairness of judges. Whether Trump is found guilty or acquitted, the trial - and how it is perceived by the public - will likely define Cannon’s career and judicial legacy. Any judge overseeing such an unprecedented, high-stakes trial will also come under enormous scrutiny. They could prompt her to be more cautious in the Trump trial. The impact of those rulings on Cannon is unclear. “To create a special exception here would defy our Nation’s foundational principle that our law applies ‘to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank,’” the judges wrote in one ruling. A federal appeals court, with several of its judges appointed by Trump, sided with the Justice Department, and twice overturned Cannon. Justice Department lawyers appealed, arguing that the Trump request was simply an effort to delay their work and that executive privilege did not apply in this case. (Cannon did not respond to a request for comment.) She also temporarily blocked parts of the Justice Department’s investigation into the trove of top secret and classified documents retrieved by federal agents, while putting forth legal arguments that Trump’s team hadn’t made, among them that the former president could suffer “injury” to his reputation if the Justice Department indicted him. In the first case, Cannon ruled in favor of Trump’s request to appoint a “special master” - a third-party attorney - to review whether the documents that the Justice Department and FBI had found in Trump’s home were protected by executive privilege, a contention that many legal experts dismissed. Cannon was randomly assigned to oversee the subsequent legal battle that unfolded between Trump’s legal team and the Justice Department. That changed after FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 for classified documents. “This process takes time and will be unfamiliar to the judge.” “They will create significant delay and litigation risk,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that most judges do not have experience with the process. Justice Department via APīrandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security prosecutor and a lead prosecutor in the Mueller investigation, noted that the use of classified documents involves a separate discovery and litigation process, under the Classified Information Processing Act, or CIPA. A photo of the boxes of documents found in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom that was released with the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump. Trump’s lawyers will likely use delay - a tactic that the former president has embraced for decades in legal battles - to their advantage. How, and how quickly, Cannon rules regarding the use of the classified documents at the center of the prosecution’s case will also have an impact. If Cannon agrees that the jury should not hear all of the Corcoran evidence, the Justice Department’s case won’t be over, but it will be critically hobbled. Trump’s lawyers have sharply criticized Howell’s ruling and will likely ask Cannon to block prosecutors from presenting evidence from Corcoran to the trial jury. The ruling, which is rare, meant that the bedrock legal principle, that attorney-client communications stay secret, did not apply because Justice Department lawyers showed that legal services had been used in furtherance of a crime. Howell, granted a request from prosecutors to apply the “crime fraud exception” to Corcoran's conversations with Trump. In March, a federal judge in Washington, Beryl A. At one point, according to Corcoran’s recounting, Trump made a “plucking” motion that seemed to indicate Corcoran should simply pull out the classified material from a batch that the lawyer planned to return to the government. The indictment makes clear that prosecutors have relied on contemporaneous notes that Corcoran took of his interactions with Trump, including his client’s resistance to turning over classified documents. Chief among those are expected filings by the Trump defense team to exclude any evidence from his defense lawyer at the time, Evan Corcoran. On Saturday, in Trump's first public remarks since the case against him was unsealed on Friday, the former president called it a “ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized ‘Department of Injustice.’”Ī significant issue before the case even reaches trial is how, and how quickly, Cannon resolves pretrial motions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |