The Order Dismissing Donald Trump’s Stolen Documents Case in Florida Is Exponentially Worse Than You Think
The consequences of the ruling—legal and political—lie well beyond what major-media talking heads are acknowledging, and oddly are ruinous for not just our democracy but certain Trump talking points.
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Donald Trump has spent over a year telling the voters he needs to have vote for him in November to stay out of state and/or federal prison for the rest of his natural life that his political rival Joe Biden—and President Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland—are puppeteering the two federal criminal cases remaining against him: one in Florida and one in Washington.
In court, Trump is saying exactly the opposite—meaning that he either doesn’t believe what he’s telling voters or doesn’t believe what he’s been representing to U.S. courts.
The Trump claim, in court, is that Special Counsel Jack Smith isn’t just too independent of the Biden administration and the Biden Department of Justice, but so independent that it’s illegal. In short, what Trump is saying in federal court is a grenade-toss aimed squarely at the center of the rhetoric he’s using to try to get reelected and avoid prison.
Which is why it’s so stunning—if also predictably hypocritical and deceitful—that the man celebrated a judge he appointed tossing out a federal criminal case she’s been delaying and mishandling from the start in a way many attorneys deem corrupt not by acknowledging what the ruling actually said (that Jack Smith is too independent of any Biden appointee or Biden himself), but reiterating his entirely distinct public rhetoric.
It is galling—yet somehow also par for the course—that a man infamous for lying or else invoking the Fifth Amendment under oath in court proceedings is in this post confirming for all America to see that he again lied in court by making claims about Jack Smith he now swears to voters he doesn’t actually believe.
Donald Trump insisting, in his usual, shrieking all-caps-punctuated terms, that “the Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL” the criminal cases against him—putting aside for the moment that there’s no evidence of this at all, that it doesn’t even make sense given that several of the cases referenced are state cases, or that some of the cases pre-date Jack Smith’s appointment—means, and unambiguously, that he now claims DOJ in fact has precisely the level of control over Smith he was demanding it have (and claiming it didn’t have) in the remote Florida district court where his Stolen Documents Case is being heard.
In short, if what Trump says above is true, it means his case was wrongly dismissed; if it’s not true, he’s lying to voters about major felony charges against him—charges that historically have led to prison time for other defendants—which in itself would seem to suggest a “consciousness of guilt” over his gross misconduct in stealing classified documents from the White House and then publicly claiming he’s entitled to sell them.
But it gets worse.
The order just issued by a Trump appointee who’s rather universally seen as also a Trump partisan wasn’t only timed in such a way that its release kicks off the RNC in Milwaukee with a major Trump victory; wasn’t only timed in such a way that it gives the man who made it possible—the man who appointed its judicial author to her job—a new argument to make, and to have others make, at every speech at the Convention; wasn’t only timed in such a way that the inevitable appeal of it by Jack Smith can’t possibly move through the federal courts in time for this trial to happen pre-election even if Judge Cannon’s ruling is overturned; but was issued on grounds that now likely destroy the only other federal criminal case Mr. Trump has remaining: the one in DC.
Had Judge Cannon found a way to do the bidding of a man she hopes will appoint her to either a federal circuit court (or even the Supreme Court) that only encompassed the proceedings in the case before her—the Stolen Documents Case—it would have been a massive boon to Trump, but not necessarily a career-making one (keeping in mind that Trump has a demonstrated history of rewarding corrupt public officials in Florida, from making the man who protected him from fallout over his friend Jeffery Epstein’s child sex-trafficking, Alexander Acosta, his Secretary of Labor, to hiring as his lawyer Florida’s former corrupt Attorney General, Pam Bondi).
So that’s not what the judge did.
What Judge Cannon did is find a pre-textual basis to end Trump’s Florida case that also now requires that the same question—whether Jack Smith was legally appointed and is legally performing his duties—be presented and dealt with in the D.C. federal criminal case over January 6, which as it happens was the only case Trump still faces that until today had a chance of being heard pre-election.
In short, if Smith is an illegal player in Florida, he’s also an illegal player in D.C. And once Trump raises this newly minted issue in D.C.—which he will once SCOTUS stops artificially holding onto its recent presidential immunity decision for the maximum duration it can (refusing to send the ruling back to Judge Tanya Chutkan in D.C. for further proceedings is another under-reported SCOTUS gift to Trump)—either Judge Chutkan will agree with Judge Cannon and drop Trump’s D.C. criminal case or she will contradict Judge Cannon and create a need for SCOTUS to step in to resolve the divergent holdings in two federal jurisdictions. Either way, Trump wins, as we’ve already seen that SCOTUS will hold up any case of his five to ten times longer than it would for any other litigant, and Election Day is now well under 120 days off.
{Note: While some say this ruling by Cannon could lead to Jack Smith getting his wish that she be replaced on the case, that would be an extraordinary and unlikely remedy by the federal circuit court overseeing her, and in any case still wouldn’t produce a pre-election trial. And if Trump wins in November, he’ll unilaterally and corruptly order his new DOJ to end all cases against him, claiming as he does so that the very voters he’s lying to right now assented to him ending all cases against him simply by voting for him. See how that bait-and-switch works?}
It’s now clear that American voters will be asked to decide on the fitness for office of a man with 54 untried felonies, and because major media persistently wrongly deploys the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra of our justice system—to be clear, a mantra that only applies to jury duty, as voters are allowed to judge a man however they wish—it is likely that few in the media will point out that no responsible voting population can ever vote for a man with 54 untried felonies. To do so is civic malpractice. More likely, what we will hear from American major media is that Trump looked like a real badass in photos taken immediately after his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
And those are some great photos.
They’re great photos of a rapist, fraudster, serial sexual predator, public incest-ideator, serial adulterer, pathological liar, malignant narcississtic sociopath, human trafficker, war criminal, misogynist, homophobe, antisemite, transphobe, Islamophobe, con man and xenophobe with 54 pending felonies and a history of bribing public officials and receiving bribes from others.
Indeed, a recent Supreme Court ruling on Bribery that was made possible by judges Trump rammed through Congress in contravention of all nomination conventions made clear that bribes can be legally given to a politician provided the repayment for them occurs after the fact, so for all we know a newly emboldened Judge Cannon is just honoring that ruling by doing Trump a lawless “in-kind” solid now that she absolutely expects will be well-rewarded down the line.
And who knows? Maybe it will be. In a corrupted democracy with unequal application of the law—which America now is—anything’s possible and everything is permissible.
We are the only remedy to all this corruptness. The remedy is us, we have to vote, and the turnout has to be so huge that we keep the Senate and regain the House. We can't just rely on the courts as convict Trump has poisoned the judicial process to his benefit, that much is obvious. It has to be us. We need to rise up and vote for our democracy this November.
Feels like our country is in free fall.