LUCY CANNON REFUSES TO LEARN HER LESSON

One would have thought that federal judge Aileen Mercedes “Lucy” Cannon would have learned her lesson after she was schooled by the 11th Circuit Court overruling her crazy decisions last week.

One would be wrong to have thought that.

This afternoon, Lucy Cannon was at it again.

In a new ruling, she extended the Special Master’s deadline for finishing the review of the 11,000 documents found at Merde-A-Loco to December 16, as the Trump attorneys complained that they could not finish their work in the time frame given them by Judge Dearie.

Since the Trump lawyers cannot find a company to digitize the several hundred thousand pages of these documents, she also extended the deadline for the Trump lawyers to provide a list of documents that were “planted” by the FBI, with a deadline of October 5 to finalize a vendor.

She then gave an extension for the DOJ to provide the list they already provided, to October 13 with a Notice of Completion of October 14. Trump then has 21 days, until November 4, to submit any claims of privilege. There is then 10 more days, until November 15, for Trump and the DOJ to submit any disagreements and answers to the disagreements, to those claims.

“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents,” Cannon wrote in her ruling, adding that her earlier order appointing Dearie “did not contemplate that obligation.”

The ruling helps Trump avoid having to say whether or not the records the FBI took were all in his possession before the raid. With this, he no longer has to state his objections to the accuracy of the DOJ’s inventory in court, where perjury is a crime.

Cannon’s new order will allow Trump to lodge objections based on attorney-client and work product privileges, on whether the records are presidential or personal records per the Presidential Records Act. This allows him to get around the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled can only be made by a sitting president, and which in this case the Biden Administration has not made, by allowing him to make claims of Executive Privilege through attorney-client privilege.

As Cannon bends over backwards to give Trump all the delay he wants that she can not-so plausibly provide, the ruling is altogether another Cannon special in which it appears she has exceeded her authority and usurped the powers she gave to the special master, for the sole purpose of extending the special master process through the midterm election while freeing Trump from the requirement to provide proof that the DOJ planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago as he claimed.

It is difficult to capture just how unheard of and unprecedented this is. Trump literally asked for Judge Dearie to be the Special Master. Dearie has used his expertise to push the case in ways that Trump didn’t expect. So now, only a couple weeks after Dearie’s appointment, Cannon is jumping in and overruling him in the most transparently one-sided ways. It’s not going too far to say that she is now essentially acting as Trump’s defense counsel.

Special Masters work on behalf of the judge who appoints them. At the end of the process, Dearie can make recommendations that Cannon does not have to accept. In the narrow sense that she has the authority to direct his work, she is not acting beyond her authority. But by jumping in and overruling Dearie’s entirely reasonable and unremarkable decisions about how he will conduct the review, Cannon has removed whatever pretense was left that she is there to oversee the case under the law as opposed to actively working to protect Trump.

Despite the ruling by two Trump-appointed appeals court justices against this, Cannon is now demonstrating that there are at least certain Trump-appointed justices who will take as their work the defense of the man who appointed them that Trump believed he was getting in his appointments.

The corruption of the judicial system continues, with Cannon demonstrating what happens when a political “judge” continues to act politically rather than judicially, despite being given instruction by her legal superiors as to how she is to conduct this case.

The 11th Circuit is going to have to bring some remedial education to bear in the coming appeal.

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