Judge Cannon Puts Jack Smith on Trial

by Julie Kelly

While vacating Donald Trump’s trial date, Cannon set an aggressive hearing schedule over the next several weeks that will turn the tables on Smith and the Department of Justice.

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon may have just indefinitely postponed Donald Trump’s espionage and obstruction trial but that doesn’t mean her federal courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida will lie dormant over the next few months.

In officially vacating the existing May 20 trial date—an impossibility considering the defendant will be in a Manhattan courtroom for the foreseeable future—Cannon declined to set another date, calling it “imprudent” at this stage of the process. She noted a “myriad” of unresolved matters in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 42-count indictment against the former president and his two co-defendants, Mar-a-Lago employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Olivera, for willfully retaining national defense information and attempting to impede the government’s investigation.

Cannon, however, did schedule a number of proceedings that could be considered a way to put the Department of Justice on trial. In a stunning turn of events, Cannon, appointed by Donald Trump in 2020, is poised to make Smith a defendant of sorts.

Over the next several weeks, prosecutors will be forced to publicly counter defense motions that accuse the DOJ of selective and vindictive prosecution; insist the appointment of Smith is illegal; and claim that several parties, including Joe Biden’s White House, colluded behind the scenes as early as May 2021 to concoct the unprecedented case.

Her hearing schedule represents a broader spilling of bad blood between Cannon and the DOJ dating back to September 2022, when Cannon took the courageous step of appointing a special master, or third party, to vet the all of the evidence seized by the FBI during the armed raid of Mar-a-Lago the month before.

Noting at the time the prosecution’s suspected leaks to the news media and the mishandling of evidence in the early stages of the investigation—in addition to what she called the need for “public trust” in the case—Cannon granted Trump’s request for the special master.

Although the 11th Circuit Court overturned her order a few months later on grounds she did not have proper jurisdiction, Cannon now is exonerated amid disclosures by Smith in a May 3 brief that evidence has been mishandled and key documents possibly misplaced. “[There] are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans (taken right after the raid),” Smith’s team revealed, referring to 34 boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago.

Smith also revealed that in some instances, sheets of paper that FBI investigators used to replace classified records within a box do not match. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Smith wrote.

In other words, the government officials prosecuting Trump with mishandling top-secret files–mishandled top-secret files.

Trump Off the Hook for Now, Smith Goes on Defense

Even more problematic is Smith’s confession that his lead prosecutor, Jay Bratt, misrepresented to Cannon the existing condition of the boxes. During an April hearing, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied that they were with “the exception that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”

Smith admitted in a footnote that Bratt’s statement was “inconsistent” with the facts, which could prompt Trump’s counsel to seek a contempt of court charge.

But that might be the least of Smith’s concerns right now. Cannon’s aggressive hearing schedule will put Smith and the entire Justice Department on the hot seat—and the timing could not be worse; with the other criminal trials against Trump in Washington and Fulton County imploding, all eyes are focused on southern Florida.

Read more