Judge Cannon’s Upcoming Decision Could Spell Disaster for Trump Case

Donald Trump is trying to get the strongest evidence against him in his classified documents case thrown out: the memos written by his former lawyer Evan Corcoran.

The former president and convicted felon’s legal team is expected to ask Judge Aileen Cannon next week to remove the prosecution’s access to memos made by Corcoran, according to The Guardian. The memos note what Trump and his lawyer discussed regarding Trump complying with a court order to search his Mar-a-Lago estate for the missing classified documents.

According to the memos, after Trump received the court’s subpoena, he said to Corcoran, “Well, what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and “Well, look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

Trump’s federal indictment alleged that Trump had his employees (and now co-defendants) Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira move 64 boxes from a storage room to his residence so he could go through them, but only return 30 boxes back to the room where Corcoran would conduct his search. Corcoran would find 38 classified documents there, and Trump reportedly asked him, “Did you find anything? ... Is it bad? Good?” and then made a plucking motion to suggest “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, pluck it out.”

Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue that the memos don’t fit under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege and that chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., should not have allowed them as evidence. And Cannon has been particularly receptive to Trump requests, agreeing to hear pretrial motions that have slowed down proceedings, throwing out parts of the case, and postponing the trial indefinitely.

The Trump-appointed judge, who had minimal trial experience prior to taking the classified documents case, turned down offers from more senior and experienced judges to take over the case. Her actions have drawn criticism, even from one of Trump’s former lawyers, who has called her a “partisan prima donna.” And that’s exactly what Trump wants.

Lauren Boebert has not yet won the Republican nomination in Colorado’s 4th district, but that hasn’t stopped a Democratic challenger from blasting her for her infamous behavior at a performance of Beetlejuice in Denver.

John Padora, a Democrat running to replace Republican Representative Ken Buck in the district, has wasted no time going after Boebert, the best-known candidate in next week’s Republican primary. His new advertisement, recorded at a similar angle to the security camera that captured her vaping and groping her date in the middle of the musical, is going viral.

“I’m sitting in the very same seat Lauren Boebert got kicked out of, the same way she got kicked out of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. Now she’s picked up her bags and fled to eastern Colorado,” Padora says in the fundraising spot.

Boebert announced she would not run for reelection in the 3rd district after eking out a reelection victory in 2022 and then being outraised by a Democratic challenger and losing the endorsement of several prominent district Republicans for the upcoming election. She fled to the redder 4th district—but her date-night hijinks seem to have followed her, and Padora is taking full advantage.

“Boebert’s an opportunistic carpetbagger, and we deserve real leadership here in Colorado’s 4th,” Padora says.

Of all of Boebert’s transgressions that Padora might have seized on—promoting the QAnon conspiracy, engaging in election denialism, giving customers at her open-carry restaurant diarrhea by serving them tainted pork—accusing her of carpetbagging seems, if anything, tame.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced Thursday night that he plans to sue the state of New York in retaliation for Donald Trump’s criminal conviction. The conservative AG vowed to “restore the rule of law”—but not the ones that found Trump guilty, of course—and deemed Trump’s hush-money trial “unconstitutional lawfare.”

But it doesn’t seem like Bailey understands the law in New York at all, and it doesn’t look like he’s paid much attention to the details of Trump’s hush-money trial. According to Axios, Bailey is pursuing his lawsuit against New York on the basis that the statute of limitations for misdemeanor business records falsification expired in 2019.

There’s just two big hiccups with Bailey’s argument: Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts, not misdemeanors, and the statute of limitations for those felonies is five years after the start of criminal proceedings—not two like with misdemeanors. It’s also unclear where Bailey is getting 2019 as a statute of limitations from: The federal criminal proceedings against Trump kicked off in 2018 after an explosive Wall Street Journal story stated Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels in 2016. The FBI soon raided Cohen, who that same year pleaded guilty to giving hush-money payments to Daniels and another woman, claiming he did so on Trump’s behalf. State criminal proceedings based on Cohen’s testimony formally began in August 2019, four years before Trump was indicted and five years before he was convicted, all of which fall well within New York’s five-year statute of limitations.

Whether Bailey is just bad at math, the law, or keeping up to date on Trump trial chaos ultimately matters little. His lawsuit represents a new wave of attacks that can be best described as, to use Bailey’s wording, “unconstitutional lawfare” being carried out in retaliation for Trump’s conviction. In his rush to preen himself as the ultimate pro-Trump attorney general (during an election year where he’s running against a member of Trump’s legal team), Bailey may soon find himself falling flat on his face: It doesn’t seem Bailey bothered to look into New York’s extremely strong anti-SLAPP laws, which prohibit against retaliatory lawsuits attempting to impede against public participation of matters of public interest. And convicting a former president certainly constitutes a matter of public interest.

Trump ally Matt Schlapp is poking the bear—or should we say, the Beast.

Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, took to social media Friday to taunt the Daily Beast over the reported exit of its new D.C. bureau chief, Martin Pengelly, who joined the embattled outlet only recently.

In his post, Schlapp tagged the Beast’s senior political reporter Roger Sollenberger, who in January 2023 was the first to publish anonymous allegations that Schlapp had sexually assaulted Carlton Huffman, a former campaign staffer for Herschel Walker.

Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, have since crusaded against the Beast, calling it “Satan’s publication to persecute Christians and their families.”

Sollenberger has continued to rigorously document the subsequent sexual battery and defamation lawsuit against Schlapp, and when it was dropped earlier this year, the reporter revealed that it was because Schlapp had paid Huffman $480,000 to do so, through the ACU’s insurer.

And Friday was no exception, with Sollenberger hitting back hard at Schlapp’s post on X, formerly Twitter, toasting Pengelly’s exit.

“Life’s a real bitch,” Schlapp wrote, tagging Sollenberger. He may yet live to regret the popcorn bucket emoji he added, as Sollenberger was quick to respond.

“Heard about your wedding. Heard about the DC parties in the 90s. Heard about the Meatpacking District,” Sollenberger wrote. “Why didn’t you run for Senate in 2020?”

“I can keep going,” he continued in a separate post.

“Matt is saying this knowing full well what was in our first comment request and apparently does not give a damn about the restraint we’ve shown him,” Sollenberger wrote in another tweet.

It seems that Sollenberger has plenty of dirt to drop, and the disgraced conservative lobbyist might do well to remember that.

The co-author of a bill mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed inside public school classrooms in Louisiana took to cable news for her victory lap after the measure was signed into law. Needless to say, her justifications for the blatant violation of religious freedom crumbled under the most basic scrutiny.

On two different CNN programs, Louisiana state Representative Lauren Ventrella trotted out the same defense. “Boris, I bet you CNN pays you a lot of money, and I bet you’ve got a bunch of dollar bills in that wallet,” she told anchor Boris Sanchez, who was floored by her apparent non sequitur. “I got a dollar bill in my wallet. ‘In God We Trust’ is written on that dollar. It is not forcing anybody to believe one viewpoint; it’s merely posting a historical reference on the wall.”

When Sanchez pointed out Ventrella’s ahistoricism, she retreated into crime-wave fearmongering: “This nation has gotten out of hand, with crime, with the bad, negative things that are going on. Why is it so preposterous that we would want our students to have the option to have some good principles instilled in them?” she said.

Sanchez asked what she would tell parents, students, and teachers of different faiths who objected to the commandments’ mandatory classroom presence, and Ventrella’s mask slipped. “Don’t look at it,” she replied.

The Republican lawmaker repeated her dollar bill argument during an interview with Abby Phillip Thursday night. “Look, ‘In God We Trust’ is on the dollar bill. If I had one right, I’d show you,” she said.

Phillip reminded Ventrella that the phrase did not appear on dollar bills until the 1950s and does not represent an original document comparable to the Constitution, from which references to God are absent.

“Well, it’s still on our dollar bill, no matter how you want to look at it,” Ventrella shot back.

Ventrella then laid bare the mechanisms by which Christian nationalists, cloaked in religious liberty and “good principles,” hope to install their broadly unpopular agenda. “You have to remember,” she told Phillip, “this is a new bench.”

“The Lemon decision was completely different. Now, it is a different bench,” she said, referring to a previous Supreme Court precedent that banned religious displays in publicly funded schools—and blatantly rejecting the very idea of precedent.

Minoritarian institutions like the conservative-majority Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals have been shown to dispense with precedent when conservative lawmakers knowingly bring unconstitutional laws up through the courts until they find a friendly one. Ventrella, after struggling to articulate a convincing alternative defense, just gave away the game.