Special Counsel Jack Smith is respectfully requesting/demanding Judge Aileen Cannon — the unqualified partisan hack who thinks she’s Alina Habba’s understudy on Donald Trump’s defense team — to please officially dispense with the idiocy that Trump was allowed to steal state secrets based on his wild-ass “legal” theory that the PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT!1!!! means everything he touched as president is now his personal property, therefore he can take it and hide it underneath Eric’s swim trunks in the pool bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
In reality, the act specifically establishes that presidential records are public property, establishes what “presidential records” are, and gives instructions for custody and management of them, both when the president is in office and when they leave. Eric’s swim trunks are not mentioned in the text.
Trump likes to scream PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT!!!1! even though it’s quite clear he doesn’t understand what PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT111!!!1! says, and is rather regurgitating what fucking idiot Tom Fitton (not a lawyer) from Judicial Watch says it means.
Last month, Judge Habba We Mean Cannon issued a bizarre order, telling both sides to give her jury instructions for her to Choose Her Own Adventure on how the Presidential Records Act could be considered in the case, if she were to rule that Trump was correct to assert that, in essence, any classified document he pees on or thinks about peeing on is now his.
CNN summarized her order at the time:
“Engage with the following competing scenarios and offer alternative draft text that assumes each scenario to be a correct formulation of the law to be issued to a jury,” Cannon [wrote.]
The first version would instruct a jury to decide whether prosecutors proved that Trump did not have the authorization to keep classified documents found on his property, even if they were personal or presidential records. The second scenario would assume that as president, Trump had complete authority to take records he wanted from the White House under the PRA.
In other words, give me two versions: One that sounds kind of normal but isn’t — as Smith will explain — and a WILD AND CRAZY! one, in case Cannon decides to push this WILD AND CRAZY! button she keeps in her chambers. (No word on whether pushing the wild and crazy button confers upon the judicial button-pusher Trump golf club membership for life.)
In Smith’s response, he was like, um, fuck off? He called her order a bad order, and said she, the judge, is responsible for ruling and dispensing with the idiocy that Trump has a Presidential Records Act that allows him to do whatever he wants, or, importantly, that it has literallyfuckinganything to do with this case.
Aaron Blake’s analysis in the Washington Post refers to this as Smith putting Cannon on notice, and every lawyer he talked to agrees. Blake notes that Smith says six times that Cannon’s legal-type thinkerin’ here is wrong, and that allowing Trump’s asinine babbling about the PRA to be used as a defense would, in essence, place the judge firmly on the side of the defense before the trial even starts, and therefore literally amount to directing a verdict against the government:
He says that one version of the jury instructions Cannon requested would amount to “asking the jury to make a factual finding with no proper legal connection” to the case. He says that the other is even worse — that it “would amount to nothing more than a recitation of Trump’s PRA defense” and “would result in directing a verdict against the Government.”
Smith says if Cannon “wrongly concludes” that Trump’s babbling about the PRA amounts to good law, and that she’s going to tell the jury that, then she has a responsibility to inform everybody what a fuckup she is, so he can appeal and get the 11th Circuit Appeals Court to publicly call her an idiot. (Paraphrase.) He specifies that this is a “question of law that must be decided promptly,” and that “The Government must have the opportunity to consider appellate review well before jeopardy attaches.” Smith says more than a few billion times in this 24-page filing that he might just have to take this to the 11th Circuit, if Judge Dipshit rules like an entire dipshit.
He is so through with Cannon’s thumbs-up-ass dawdling on this case, and with her even entertaining Trump’s ignorant and self-serving so-called legal theories, considering how, as he writes, “Trump’s entire effort to rely on the PRA is not based on any facts,” but is rather a “post hoc justification that was concocted more than a year after he left the White House.” (Specifically when Tom Fitton mama-birded it up Trump’s butt in 2022.) Smith reminds Cannon that Trump didn’t make some decision during his presidency to designate the national security documents he stole as personal records. And, Smith reminds Habba We Mean Cannon, Trump has never even pretended he did to the Court!
This is simply Trump’s bullshit, and if grown-up big-time judge Aileen Cannon goes along with it, then BRB, Smith going to the 11th Circuit so those judges can call her a goddamned moron in an expeditious manner.
Hilariously, the second half of the filing contains Smith actually obeying Cannon’s order to provide two competing sets of jury instructions, while calling both of the judge’s scenarios stupid and bad. NEVERTHELESS, he does this stupid and bad thing the stupid and bad judge requested, while emphasizing repeatedly that if the jury got these instructions, they would be stupid and bad instructions.
The two scenarios posited by the Court, on the other hand, rest on the incorrect premise that a former President is authorized to possess classified information—regardless of whether he has a security clearance or a need to know, and regardless of whether he complies with applicable safeguarding regulations, so long as it is contained within a personal record. As a result, both of the Court’s scenarios are fundamentally flawed and any jury instructions that reflect those scenarios would be error. Nevertheless, as directed by the Court, the Government below provides jury instructions for each of these two legally erroneous scenarios.
Literally, these are his headings in the discussion section of Cannon’s so-called scenarios:
Scenario (a): The Jury Is Incorrectly Instructed that the Defendant Is Authorized to Possess Any Personal Record, Regardless of Classification, and the Jury Is Then Asked to Determine Whether Each Document Is Personal or Presidential
Scenario (b): The Jury Is Incorrectly Instructed that the Defendant Is Authorized to Possess Any Record that He Designated as Personal, and Is Further Incorrectly Instructed that, by Failing to Transfer the Charged Documents to NARA, the Defendant Made the Unreviewable Decision to Designate the Charged Documents as Personal.
After calling Cannon’s scenarios stupid a million times and explaining why, Smith concludes:
For the reasons set forth above and in the Government’s opposition to Trump’s motion to dismiss based upon the PRA, the Court should reject the legal premise that the PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has any bearing on the element of unauthorized possession under Section 793(e). As such, it should deny Trump’s pending motion to dismiss and adopt preliminary jury instructions as proposed by the Government above. If, however, the Court does not reject that erroneous legal premise, it should make that decision clear now, long before jeopardy attaches, to allow the Government the opportunity to seek appellate review.
Yes, the very last words in Smith’s filing are him saying yet again that if Cannon’s going to be a fucking idiot about this, she has a responsibility to say so now, so he can take it to the 11th Circuit so they can all laugh at her.
Love,
Jack Smith
[Washington Post / CNN / filing]
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