...open display of frustration...
...causing delays...
...mounting impatience...
...allowed the case to become bogged down...
...logjam of unresolved issues...
...curious procedural requests...
...the most directly prosecutors have confronted Judge Cannon...
...legal reasoning and unhurried pace...
...even though both sides say they could be ready for one by summer. ...
Jack Smith, all but begged Judge Cannon to move the case along...
Trump’s most brazen claims:...
...he transformed them into his own personal property...
...prosecutors derided...
“...pure fiction”...
...open to embracing the very same defense. ...
Judge Cannon’s order for jury instructions was odd...
...has not set a trial date yet. ...
...even stranger...
...appearing to adopt Trump’s position...
...nudging any eventual jurors toward acquitting Trump...
...even leaving open the possibility that she herself could acquit the former president by declaring that the government had failed to prove its case. ...
...entire notion of submitting jury instructions...“fundamentally flawed legal premise.”...
...Trump’s motion to dismiss the case...has been sitting on her desk for almost six weeks. ...
...if the case is allowed to reach the jury, any ruling she might make acquitting Mr. Trump cannot be appealed. ...
Almost from the moment she was assigned the case...Judge Cannon...has handled the proceeding in an unorthodox manner. ...
She has put off making several legal and logistical decisions. ...
...spent time at hearings entertaining a series of unusual arguments by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that many federal judges would have rejected out of hand.
...legal gamesmanship she has encouraged...all the more bizarre because the argument itself is legally dubious. ...
The [Presidential Records Act] was put in place...precisely for the opposite reason:...most records from a president’s time in office remain in the possession of the government. ...
...Trump’s lawyers have never said he officially designated the documents in question as his own. ...
Rather, they have claimed that the designation can be inferred from the fact that he took them from the White House to Mar-a-Lago...
— and no one recalled Mr. Trump saying he had designated the records that ultimately wound up in the case as personal. ...
“To the contrary,” the prosecutors wrote, “every witness who was asked this question had never heard such a thing.”...
...only one of the many questions that Judge Cannon has failed to resolve...
The delays could have a profound effect on the case: If it is pushed past the election and Mr. Trump wins, he could order his attorney general to simply dismiss the charges. ...
...has so far not issued a ruling on a request made in January by Mr. Trump’s lawyers for additional discovery material...
...judge is also sitting on a nearly 2-month-old request by Mr. Smith to permit redactions to be made to several of Mr. Trump’s own filings to protect the identities of witnesses who might testify for the government at trial. ...
...is still considering a host of the former president’s pretrial motions to the dismiss the case...
...prosecutors could at some point file a motion asking Judge Cannon to remove herself ...She would probably reject that effort, requiring the government to go over her head...
Typically, recusal motions require prosecutors to point to flawed decisions. And so far, Judge Cannon has largely avoided making decisions, complicating any effort to get rid of her.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/us/politics/trump-documents-case-judge-cannon.html