Here we go.
Palm Beach County State Attorney David Aronberg says Jack Smith is close to using a ‘nuclear button’ to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from the Trump classified documents case over her jury instruction order.
“He is close to pushing the nuclear button,” said Palm Beach County State Attorney David Aronberg, according to NBC News. “It is a high burden to reach, and it is rarely done, but her proposed jury instructions may have pushed him to the breaking point.”
Last month Judge Aileen Cannon issued a jury instruction order in Jack Smith’s classified documents case and the leftist legal analysts went apocalyptic.
Cannon gave two options for jury instructions.
The first option:
In a prosecution of a former president for allegedly retaining documents in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), a jury is permitted to examine a record retained by a former president in his/her personal possession at the end of his/her presidency and make a factual finding as to whether the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it is personal or presidential using the definitions set forth in the Presidential Records Act (PRA).
The second option is:
A president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision. Although there is no formal means in the PRA by which a president is to make that categorization, an outgoing president’s decision to exclude what he/she considers to be personal records from presidential records transmitted to the National Archives and Records Administration constitutes a president’s categorization of those records as personal under the PRA.
Jack Smith earlier this week threatened to take the jury instruction fight to the appellate court.
On Thursday Judge Cannon declined Jack Smith’s demands of her jury instruction order as “unprecedented and unjust.”
“Separately, to the extent the Special Counsel demands an anticipatory finalization of jury instructions prior to trial, prior to a charge conference, and prior to the presentation of trial defenses and evidence, the Court declines that demand as unprecedented and unjust,” Cannon wrote.
She continued, “The Court’s Order soliciting preliminary draft instructions on certain counts should not be misconstrued as declaring a final definition on any essential element or asserted defense in this case. Nor should it be interpreted as anything other than what it was: a genuine attempt, in the questions to be submitted to the jury in this complex case of first impression.”
Palm Beach County State Attorney David Aronberg and other defense attorneys are now encouraging Jack Smith to go nuclear and remove Judge Cannon from the case.
“Cannon seems to be daring Smith,” Aronberg said, according to NBC News.
Excerpt from NBC News:
Special counsel Jack Smith could soon seek to have the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case recused, prosecutors and defense attorneys warn, describing Smith as being pressed to the “breaking point” over arguments his office said could taint a trial irrevocably.
Smith faulted Judge Aileen Cannon in a scathing rebuke for seeming to take at face value Trump’s “fundamentally flawed” claim around a president’s official and personal records when she asked both sides to put forth competing versions of instructions for jurors in the case and said her request would “distort” the trial. Smith indicated in that filing that if Cannon ruled against federal prosecutors, this could be a trigger for an appeal to the 11th Circuit that could remove her from the case.
But instead of backing away, Aronberg said that Cannon, including in a court filing on Thursday explaining her proposed jury scenarios, has stoked these tensions, so Smith may see no option but to appeal.