Judge Cannon Blocks Trump Gag Order in Pettiest Way Possible

Judge Aileen Cannon rejected a gag order request in Donald Trump’s classified documents trial Tuesday on the basis that the filing wasn’t polite enough.

The gag order, filed by special counsel Jack Smith, was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy,” according to the judge, who noted that the request did not allot enough follow-up time for Trump’s legal team to discuss the request.

“Because the filing of the Special Counsel’s Motion did not adhere to these basic requirements, it is due to be denied without prejudice. Any future, non-emergency motion brought in this case—whether on the topic of release conditions or anything else—shall not be filed absent meaningful, timely, and professional conferral,” Cannon wrote.

It’s just one of many subtle wins that Cannon has handed to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in the trial. Earlier this month, she ordered a temporary stay on Trump’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed—but never added an expiration date to it, effectively placing an indefinite hold on the proceedings.

Legal experts have warned that Cannon’s delayed actions and aversion to expedite the federal obstruction case could delay the trial until after November, and could also be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.

On Thursday, former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb accused Cannon of “incompetence,” insisting that there’s more than enough evidence—and time—to take the case to trial before Election Day.

“And frankly, this is a case that should’ve started trial yesterday or two days ago when the original trial date was set,” Cobb told CNN. “This case could have easily gotten to trial. Only her incompetence and perceived bias has prevented that.”

It’s amazing how much junior Senator Tim Scott can talk while licking Trump’s oxfords until they sparkle. The Trump toady and rumored veep contender spent the weekend spouting lie after lie on behalf of the incessantly indicted demagogue.

Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union on Sunday, Scott derided a new campaign ad from the Biden administration targeting Black voters by reminding them of Trump’s fondness for racists. The ad says:

Donald Trump disrespecting Black folk is nothing new. He was sued for refusing to rent his apartments to black families and called for the execution of five innocent black and brown teenagers. It’s why Trump stood with violent white supremacists, warned of a blood bath if he loses the next election, and, if he’s president again, vowed to be a dictator who wants revenge on his enemies.

Scott called the ad “insulting,” then shifted to pitch his dear leader, saying, “There are two things that are driving Black votes back to Donald Trump: jobs and justice. Number one, under Donald Trump, our wages were going up. Right now, fairness is going down.”

Scott then pivoted to falsely claim Biden is resegregating schools, saying, “The elimination of charter schools under Joe Biden resegregates schools in America.” In reality, charter schools intensify school segregation and are a major cause of school segregation in the United States, according to multiple studies. Additionally, charter schools haven’t been eliminated under Biden whatsoever: The Charter Schools Program—the federal grant program that distributes public funds to privately managed schools—received $440 million last year, the same amount of funding  it has received since 2019 under the Trump administration.

In response to Trump getting aggressively booed at the Libertarian National Convention, Scott absurdly claimed to CNN, “I saw a wave of red hats at the Libertarian convention” and that “Donald Trump’s popularity continues to increase.” Alas, the red hats were for Argentina’s fascist populist president, Javier Milei, a Trump admirer and economy ruiner.

When Bash asked Scott about false statements Trump made that he “nearly escaped death” and that the FBI was “locked and loaded and ready to take me out” for a raid of his Mar-a-Lago home, Scott simply deflected. “Once again, we find ourselves reinforcing this two-tiered justice system—where we see a different standard for Republicans and specifically a different standard for Donald Trump,” Scott said.

Trump’s gripe about the Mar-a-Lago raid stems from language in a search warrant to retrieve classified documents he stashed. The warrants include a boilerplate note that deadly force is allowed “only when necessary” and described such a circumstance if someone “poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” Trump referenced the boilerplate language in a fundraising email to falsely claim Biden was trying to assassinate him. In reality, the FBI made sure to conduct its raid of Mar-a-Lago on a day where Trump would not be present, in order to avoid confrontation. A similar warrant was also drafted to search Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home but was not necessary because Biden cooperated with the investigation.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez may be indicted for allegedly taking envelopes of cash and gold bars from local businessmen in exchange for favors with foreign officials, but that doesn’t mean he’s finished living the high life.

Instead, Menendez is reportedly spending thousands of dollars of campaign donations at Morton’s Steakhouse in Washington, D.C., “where the filet mignon starts at $56 and the tomahawks top out at $139,” according to The Daily Beast.

The campaign—which has only managed to raise a little more than $95,000 this year—has so far spent $7,012.51 at the steakhouse, paying the bill via Menendez’s New Millennium political action committee. Menendez’s committees also spent $1,489.22 at three New Jersey restaurants in January, $1,500 for catering from Italian standby Carmine’s, and $464.24 at an exclusive club near Capitol Hill, reported the Beast.

And Menendez can continue to have his donors foot the bill for as long as he wants. The disgraced Garden State politician can keep spending so long as he can claim that the meals were meetings, even if he ends up blowing every penny and then some, according to a campaign finance lawyer who spoke with the publication. Brett Kappel of the firm Harmon Curran noted that the “candidate is not personally liable for the debts of the campaign.”

And there’s even precedent for Menendez to do the same with his attorneys: The embattled politico could effectively rinse his hands of his legal bills by reporting the fees as outstanding campaign debt, since the criminal charges are “arising out of his status as a federal officeholder.”

“He could theoretically list them as campaign debts and never pay them, just file FEC reports every four months,” Kappel told the Beast. “The actual deadline is when the lawyers refuse to do any more work, because they need to get paid.”

Still, the campaign has quite a bit more cash to chew through—roughly $3.5 million—before it’s in jeopardy.

The New Jersey Democrat and his wife stand accused of acting as foreign agents for Egypt, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of flashy gifts in exchange for Menendez’s “power and influence to protect and enrich” the businessmen and government of Egypt. In a superseding indictment filed in January, Menendez was also accused of other corruption-related charges, including allegedly taking bribes from Qatar in an attempt to help a New Jersey real estate developer secure a multimillion-dollar investment from a company tied to the Middle Eastern country and collecting lavish gifts in exchange for his handiwork. Menendez and his wife have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Just a reminder to those who forgot: Donald Trump doesn’t care for the nation’s veterans, and he never did.

A montage of the notorious draft dodger’s old musings on the military went viral on Memorial Day. The audio medley, assembled by The Daily Show, featured the voices of several network anchors reporting on just how little the presumptive GOP presidential nominee actually cares about the military, from leveraging charity funds intended for the military to prop up his 2020 presidential campaign to deriding people who sacrifice their lives for their country as “suckers” and “losers.”

In one clip from 2015, Trump claimed that late Senator John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

“I like people that weren’t captured, OK?” Trump said.

In another snippet taken from Trump’s presidency, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reported that Trump opted to play golf rather than reaching out to the families of U.S. soldiers who were left behind and killed during a controversial ambush in Niger.

“Trump has faced major criticism for not reaching out to the families of four U.S. soldiers,” Ruhle said. “He has played golf at least four times since these young men were killed.”

Trump was later caught on tape laughing while recalling the incident to White House aides, and caught more flack after he fumbled the name of one of the soldiers’ widows when he finally got on the phone with her.

“I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name, and that’s what hurt me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name?” Myeshia Johnson, the wife of late Army Sergeant La David Johnson, told ABC News weeks after the ambush.

Donald Trump revealed new details of his horrific massive deportation plan at the Libertarian National Convention on Monday, where he was mostly booed by the crowd, saying he wants to grant cops who carry out mass deportation total immunity from misconduct investigations and lawsuits.

Alt-right podcaster and beanie enthusiast Tim Pool interviewed Trump—because the Libertarian National Convention is nothing if not a fever dream—asking him, “I know that you’ve said there’s gonna be the largest deportation effort in your next term. How do we do it?”

Trump rambled, as he does, about an estimated 15 to 17 million people he wants to deport—numbers that contradict existing data and that he seems to have just made up—who’ve entered the United States for asylum and job opportunities, baselessly accusing them of being “murderers … drug dealers … coming from mental institutions,” before finally saying he wants to use “local police” to enforce his mass deportation plans.

“It will really be done with local police,” said Trump before devolving into a barely coherent tirade explaining his desire to provide immunity to his future deportation gestapo:

Do you know, the respect has been taken away, the honor has been taken away from our police forces. They’re not allowed to do anything, and whether it’s libertarian or not libertarian, people have to have, you have to have law and order. You can’t have 500 people walking into a department store and just walking out with everything they have, and we have to give honor and respect back, and I believe immunity because, you know, so often when a police person does their job they end up with no pension, they end up with no house, they end up with no family. Everything’s taken away from them. They have to get their own lawyer. So we’re gonna give them back their dignity and their strength.

Trump’s depiction of police accountability is an extremely exaggerated detailing of what could happen when someone with a cushy job loses that job for engaging in egregious violations of the law. His desire to shield cops from accountability builds on existing qualified immunity policies, which shield cops from being held personally liable for violating someone’s constitutional rights without a high-bar precedent. Under these policies, someone else in the same position has to have violated a person’s constitutional rights in the same way and have been held accountable for that violation—an intensely confusing policy that essentially functions to severely limit people’s ability to pursue misconduct lawsuits against cops who violate their constitutional rights.