Judge Cannon Brutally Roasted for “Partisan Prima Donna” Behavior

Donald Trump’s former ally took Judge Aileen Cannon to task after a shocking new report showed that she’s been fighting to protect the former president in his classified documents case since it first landed on her desk.

Cannon refused early calls from senior federal judges to hand off Trump’s classified documents case, according to a new report from The New York Times Thursday, making it clearer than ever that she has been determined to help the former president from the beginning.

Case in point: Cannon was set to begin a multiday hearing Friday to determine the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to the classified documents case, simply because Trump requested one.

Ty Cobb, a former lawyer in Trump’s White House, wasn’t having any of it.

In an interview on CNN Thursday night, he told Erin Burnett that the hearing is unlikely to remove Smith from the case, since “the law requires that she validate Jack Smith’s appointment, and not disqualify him.”

“The jurisprudence on this goes back to 1988 when the Independent Counsel statute, which preceded special counsel appointments … was fully vetted in the Supreme Court and upheld,” explained Cobb.

“The worst thing that could happen to her is that she actually does rule for Trump on this, because that would go to the Eleventh Circuit, and then I think this petty, partisan prima donna would be put in her place, and they would remove her,” the lawyer said.

Cobb called Cannon’s willingness to acquiesce to Trump’s requests “silly” and “shocking,” and said her actions go “way beyond” just being inexperienced. “The reality is, she is slow. And she’s slow on purpose,” he said.

Cobb has repeatedly spoken out against the former president, previously saying Trump “poses the gravest threat to American democracy that we’ve ever seen.” Cobb also signed onto a brief to the Supreme Court challenging Trump’s claim to presidential immunity.

He’s also been one of Cannon’s strongest critics. Last month, Cobb said the judge was “incapable of ruling intelligently,” and previously called her decision to consider the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment “ludicrous,” “ridiculous,” “dangerous,” and “incendiary.”

In a ruling delivered Friday, the Supreme Court decided 6–3 that U.S. citizens have no constitutional interest in their noncitizen spouses being able to enter the United States—despite the fact that a married person has an inherent interest in their spouse being able to live in the same country as they do. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned the ruling is an obvious sign the court will seek to overturn protections for marriage equality next.

Sotomayor issued a dire warning in her dissent, accusing the conservative supermajority of chipping away at constitutional protections for married couples and saying they’re making “the same fatal error” as they did in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal abortion protections.

“The majority, ignoring these precedents, makes the same fatal error it made in Dobbs: requiring too ‘careful [a] description of the asserted fundamental liberty interest,’” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s failure to respect the right to marriage in this country consigns U.S. citizens to rely on the fickle grace of other countries’ immigration laws to vindicate one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’ and live alongside their spouses.”

The case involved Sandra Muñoz, a U.S. citizen whose husband was denied a visa by the U.S. consulate in El Salvador. That denial came from a broad provision in U.S. immigration law that disqualifies a person from obtaining a visa if the consulate knows “or has reasonable ground to believe” that a person is trying to enter the U.S. “to engage solely, principally, or incidentally in” unlawful activity. Her husband was denied because of tattoos he has, which a court-appointed gang tattoo expert later determined were not gang-related.

Muñoz sued the State Department, arguing that her husband’s inexplicable denial of entry into the U.S. infringed on her constitutional liberty interest in her husband’s visa application and their inability to start a life together in the U.S. In upholding the denial, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices decided not just that the State Department doesn’t need to provide reason for denying a visa but that a citizen’s right to be married doesn’t supersede the state’s strict, and often questionable, immigration processes. The conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court’s ruling chips away at the core of Obergefell v. Hodges—the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015—which decided that citizens have a right to marriage.

In her dissent, Sotomayor cast urgent warnings on the impact of restricting who is allowed to be married in the U.S., noting that the conservative decision will extend to couples “like the Lovings and the Obergefells, [who] depend on American law for their marriages’ validity.”

“Same-sex couples may be forced to relocate to countries that do not recognize same-sex marriage, or even those that criminalize homosexuality,” Sotomayor added. “Obergefell rejected what the majority does today as ‘inconsistent with the approach this Court has used in discussing [the] fundamental rights’ of ‘marriage and intimacy.’”

“Despite the majority’s assurance two Terms ago that its eradication of the right to abortion ‘does not undermine … in any way’ other entrenched substantive due process rights such as ‘the right to marry,’ ‘the right to reside with relatives,’ and ‘the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children,’ the Court fails at the first pass,” Sotomayor wrote in dissenting the conservative supermajority’s decision issued on Friday.

New audio from Variety co–editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh’s interview with Donald Trump confirms what the American public has known all along: The former president knows he lost the 2020 election.

During one of his six interviews with Trump for his book Apprentice in Wonderland, about Trump’s time on his reality show The Apprentice, Setoodah inquired about Trump’s relationship with former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera, who was a contestant on season 7 of the show. “And are you guys still close, or you no longer … ?” asked Setoodeh.

“No, I don’t think so. He is, uh, after I lost the election,” Trump began. Catching himself revealing that he never believed his own claims of a rigged election, he quickly revised his answer.

“I won the election, but when they said we lost, he called me three or four times,” he continued.

This is not the first time the veil has been pulled back on what was clearly a cynical attempt by Trump to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after his legitimate loss in the 2020 election. Former Attorney General William Barr alleged in 2023 that Trump “knew well he lost the election,” and former chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as aides Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, made similar claims when testifying before the House January 6 select committee.  

As CNN anchor Jim Acosta pointed out, however, Trump has never before admitted that he lost out loud, maintaining—even as lawsuit after lawsuit has ruled out the possibility of voter fraud or voting machine malfunctions—that he defeated Joe Biden.

The slip is more than just embarrassing for the 2024 presumptive Republican nominee, who continues to stoke the flames of electoral conspiracy among his supporters, four years after they stormed the Capitol. Trump’s claim may have legal consequences. 

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump alleges that he employed “knowingly false” claims of election fraud in his attempt to overturn the results of the election. That Trump would so quickly walk back a comment made during an interview for a book about his prepresidential reality TV show suggests that he’s aware of the tightrope he’s walking. 

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law prohibiting domestic abusers under restraining orders from carrying firearms, with one lone dissenter: Justice Clarence Thomas.

In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Rahimi, Thomas sided with gun rights advocates who opposed the rule, arguing that the other Supreme Court justices had somehow misunderstood a three-year-old opinion he’d written about gun regulation. In this case, however, Thomas only has himself to blame.

In 2021, Thomas wrote the majority opinion in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that kneecapped New York’s ban on publicly carrying firearms, by establishing a confusing new rule for determining whether gun laws violate the Second Amendment. Spoiler alert: Under the new rule, a lot of gun regulations would, which is precisely how Rahimi came to the Supreme Court in the first place.

According to Thomas’s opinion, regulation on a firearm must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” an impossibly vague guideline that has sparked chaos in the lower courts. But it was par for the course for the staunch originalist, who consistently leans on eighteenth-century doctrine.

While the majority opinions found that the law barring domestic abusers from possessing firearms was consistent with this test, Thomas was obviously not convinced.

“The Court and Government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence,” Thomas wrote. “Yet, in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more.”

Thomas regularly points to historical tradition when trying to strip away people’s rights: He cited this reason when overturning the nationwide right to abortion and hinted he might do the same for same-sex marriage. And now, apparently, it also applies to safety in a person’s own relationship.

Thomas argued that criminal prosecution is a good enough means of keeping guns out of the hands of those who would do harm, insisting that the government could not “strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order—even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime.”

Unfortunately for Thomas, his opinion in Bruen invites courts to look for historical analogues to rules befitting modern American society—but doesn’t determine in what way that analogue needs to be similar.

In the majority opinion, Chief Supreme Court Justice Roberts found that the law did satisfy Bruen’s requirement. “Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” Roberts wrote.

As a result of Friday’s decision in Rahimi, many lower courts may see challenges to their rulings under Bruen, as they are forced to reconsider the application of Thomas’s originalist rule.

Steve Bannon desperately wants to stay out of prison—and now he’s making a last-ditch effort to the Supreme Court.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday night denied Bannon’s latest request to delay his prison sentence, which is set to begin July 1. Now the former Trump aide and MAGA king is appealing to the Supreme Court to save him.

Barring a Supreme Court intervention, Bannon will head to prison for four months for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot in 2021. The Justice Department took the matter to federal court, leading to Bannon’s 2022 trial and conviction. The former Breitbart editor and Trump adviser fought tooth and nail, from trying to turn the trial into a circus to attempting to delay his prison sentence with last-ditch appeals, including this latest effort.

In the likely event that Bannon goes to prison, it won’t be to a minimum-security prison camp, thanks to the fact that he’s also facing charges in New York over a border wall fraud case. Instead, he’d serve time at a low-security prison, possibly Rikers Island. He’s expected to stand trial for the fraud case in September, a second attempt at holding him accountable after Trump pardoned his federal charges.

None of this appears to have humbled Bannon. He has attempted to interfere in Brazil’s politics, in addition to the upcoming election in this country, and his radio show continues to serve as a haven for far-right Republicans to rant about whatever they want. He also told a crowd at the Turning Point Action convention last Saturday about all of the people in the Justice Department that Trump will go after if he’s reelected, saying without a trace of irony that “we’re gonna use the Constitution and the rule of law to go after you and hold you accountable.”

If Bannon is expecting the Supreme Court to use the Constitution to help him avoid accountability, he may be out of luck. Peter Navarro, the former director of the White House National Trade Council, was convicted of similar charges and tried the same thing, only to be rebuffed.