Trump lawyers hope Judge Cannon can help them interfere with his other criminal cases – Raw Story
Travis Gettys is a senior editor for Raw Story based in northern Kentucky. He previously worked as a web editor for WLWT-TV and a contributing writer for the Kentucky Enquirer, and he also wrote for the award-winning Sadly, No! blog. He has covered national, state and local politics, breaking news, criminal investigations and trials, sports and a variety of community issues, with a special emphasis on racial justice, right-wing extremism and gun safety.
District judge Aileen Cannon has stunned legal experts with a series of unusually favorable rulings for Donald Trump, and the former president's lawyers are hoping she might help him avoid a trial in another federal court.
The Florida-based judge has helped Trump stall his prosecution in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, making a trial that would end before the election unlikely, and his legal team sees an opportunity for Cannon to put District judge Tanya Chutkan in a position where she could not start a trial in a District of Columbia case before voters head to the polls, reported CNN.
“Meaning, ice her,” said a person familiar with Trump’s strategy. “Making it impossible for her to jam a trial down before the election, by things that are out of her control.”
Trump's legal team has openly stated they intend to play his cases off one another to create scheduling difficulties to delay his criminal trials, and his lawyers are hoping to convince Cannon to move the classified documents trial from its late May start date to summer.
RELATED: Judge Cannon's new orders in Trump docs case make her next move 'difficult to determine'
The ex-president has already asked both federal judges and a Georgia judge to delay his trials until after the November election, and while both Cannon and Chutkan have said no, multiple sources told CNN that his attorneys are hoping that a gradually shifting calendar might accomplish the same thing.
"[Chutkan] might have him on trial the day of the election," said one source familiar with the strategy. "If she wants to do that, we might as well just make Trump president right now."
Trump's lawyers may ask Cannon at a pretrial hearing Friday to pause his trial in Florida until July, according to sources, to block out his calendar until September, which his team believes would prevent Chutkan from scheduling the election subversion case once the U.S. Supreme Court decides on his immunity claims.
They could then ask Cannon again to push back the Mar-a-Lago trial due to the complexities related to classified materials.
Chutkan could still set a trial date that overlaps with other cases, but Trump could not be on trial simultaneously in separate courts because criminal defendants have the right to be present at their own trial.
Trump's trial dates are important because polls show that independent voters may turn against him if he is convicted of a felony. A recent poll found that 53 percent of voters in key swing states would vote against Trump if convicted.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) may want to avoid shutting down the federal government, but former GOP strategist Rick Wilson warns that he may have little option.
Writing on his Substack newsletter, Wilson compared extremist House Republicans to "children with chainsaws" and said there was little chance of them not doing something self-destructive in the coming weeks.
In fact, he said that even if Johnson wanted to do something productive, he would refrain from doing so given his fear of being hounded out of office.
"The do-nothing Chaos Caucus rules the roost, still in possession of the magical motion-to-vacate artifact left over from last years 'Kevin McCarthy Must Die' jihad led by Matt Gaetz," Wilson argued. "Mike Johnson is fearful of wearing the wrong tie to work, to say nothing of trying to — heaven forfend — do anything meaningful for the people of the United States."
READ MORE: A dangerous mental illness is spreading in the Trump cult
Wilson said that the House GOP was likely on a collision course for a government shutdown, despite the fact that it knows such a move would be a political disaster.
"The GOP is holding the economy hostage again, despite the long history of this being a Very Bad Political Look," he noted. "Threatening — and actually implementing — shutdowns of government programs polls about like finding a turd in the punchbowl. Working for an economic disaster to help Donald Trump’s flailing campaign is a next-level approach to Gold in the political Darwin Olympics."
In fact, the history of government shutdowns — from the one led by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s to the one boosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2013 or Trump's shutdown in 2019 to extract funding for his border wall — has seen Republicans forced by public pressure to reopen the government without achieving any significant policy concessions from Democrats.
Read Wilson's full analysis here.
Justice Elena Kagan grilled Florida solicitor Henry Whitaker over laws that would prevent social media companies from taking down objectionable content.
Florida and Texas have passed laws that limit what content social media companies can remove from their sites.
"I mean, we point out in our brief that when we think that if you had a, an internet platform that indeed had a platform driven message, was selective on the front end, democrats.com, I think that would be a very different kind of analysis compared to a company like Facebook or YouTube, who is in the business of just basically trying to get as many eyeballs on their site as possible," Whitaker said in defense of the laws during Supreme Court oral arguments on Monday.
"But why is it different?" Kagan asked. "Facebook, YouTube, these are the paradigmatic social media companies that this law applies to and they have rules about content."
"They say, you know, you can't have hate speech on the site," she continued. "They say you can't have misinformation with respect to particular subject matter areas and they seem to take those rules, I mean, you know, somebody can say maybe they should enforce them even more than they do, but they do seem to take them seriously. They have thousands and thousands of employees who are devoted to enforcing those rules."
ALSO READ: Inside the neo-Nazi hate network grooming children for a race war
Whitaker noted that 99% of posted content was not censored on major social media sites.
"But that 1% seems to have gotten some people extremely angry," Kagan noted. "You know, the 1% that's like, we don't want anti-vaxxers on our site, or we don't want insurrectionists on our site."
"I mean, that's what motivated these laws, isn't it?" she added. "And that's what's getting people upset about them, is that other people have different views about what it means to provide misinformation as to voting and things like that. And, you know, that's the point."
Watch the video below from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hungary’s parliament voted Monday to ratify Sweden's bid to join NATO, bringing an end to more than 18 months of delays that have frustrated the alliance as it seeks to expand in response to Russia's war in Ukraine.
The vote, which passed with 188 votes for and six against, came as a culmination of months of wrangling by Hungary's allies to convince its nationalist government to lift its block on Sweden's membership. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán submitted the protocols for approving Sweden's entry into NATO in July 2022, but the matter had stalled in parliament over opposition by governing party lawmakers.
Unanimous support among all NATO members is required to admit new countries, and Hungary is the last of the alliance’s 31 members to give its backing since Turkey ratified the request last month.
Orbán, a right-wing populist who has forged close ties with Russia, has said that criticism of Hungary's democracy by Swedish politicians had soured relations between the two countries and led to reluctance among lawmakers in his Fidesz party.
But the vote on Monday removed the final membership hurdle for Sweden which, along with neighboring Finland, first applied to join the alliance in May 2022.
Addressing lawmakers before the vote, Orbán said: “Sweden and Hungary’s military cooperation and Sweden’s NATO accession strengthen Hungary’s security.”
Orbán criticized Hungary's European Union and NATO allies for placing increased pressure on his government in recent months to move forward on bringing Sweden into the alliance.
“Several people tried to intervene from the outside in the settling of our disputes (with Sweden), but this did not help but rather hampered the issue," Orbán said. "Hungary is a sovereign country, it does not tolerate being dictated by others, whether it be the content of its decisions or their timing.”
Last weekend, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators visited Hungary and announced it would submit a joint resolution to Congress condemning Hungary’s alleged democratic backsliding and urging Orbán’s government to immediately lift its block on Sweden’s trans-Atlantic integration.
But on Friday, Ulf Kristersson, Sweden's prime minister, met with Orbán in Hungary's capital where they appeared to reach a decisive reconciliation after months of diplomatic tensions.
Following their meeting, the leaders announced the conclusion of a defense industry agreement that will include Hungary's purchase of four Swedish-made JAS 39 Gripen jets and the extension of a service contract for its existing Gripen fleet.
Orbán said the additional fighter jets “will significantly increase our military capabilities and further strengthen our role abroad” and will improve Hungary’s ability to participate in joint NATO operations.
“To be a member of NATO together with another country means we are ready to die for each other,” Orbán said. “A deal on defense and military capacities helps to reconstruct the trust between the two countries.”
Monday's vote on Sweden's NATO accession was just one matter on a busy agenda for lawmakers in the Hungarian parliament. A vote was also held on accepting the resignation of President Katalin Novák, who stepped down earlier this month in a scandal over her decision to pardon to a man convicted of covering up a string of child sexual abuses.
After accepting Novák's resignation, lawmakers are expected to confirm Tamás Sulyok, the president of Hungary's Constitutional Court, as the country's new president. He is set to formally take office on March 5.
Some opposition parties have said they will not participate in a vote to confirm a new president and have called for direct presidential elections. But Sulyok was nominated by Orbán's Fidesz party, which has a two-thirds majority in parliament and is expected to easily approve his presidency.
A presidential signature is needed to formally endorse the approval of Sweden's NATO bid, which is expected within the next few days.
(AP)
Copyright © 2024 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | Manage Preferences | Debug Logs
For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com , for support contact support@rawstory.com .