Kicking, screaming, crying, dragging, whining. Donald Trump and his legal
team back at doing what they do today,
seeking to delay, delay, delay justice.
Today's effort at that in the federal criminal case brought
by Special Counsel Jack Smith
for illegally hoarding classified documents at his private club at
Mar A Lago with a disgraced ex president watching on
in person so he had no obligation to do so.
Defense attorneys sought to convince U.S.
District Judge Aileen Cannon to dismiss some or all of
the charges against Trump,
and they did so through various avenues.
The first, a motion that would wipe away those first
32 counts on the theory that the main statute used
against Trump is,
quote, unconstitutionally vague. The second,
even more audacious emotion that would dismiss the indictment entirely
on the grounds of the Presidential Records Act,
completely bars prosecution. They say somehow two straight faces that
Trump,
the snap of a finger,
had the power to transform presidential records state secrets into
personal records,
which would exclude them from the Act's requirements.
Here is the disgraced ex president in his very own
words.
Last night
I took him very legally and I wasn't hiding them.
We had boxes on the front of the and a
lot of those boxes had clothing and a lot of
we're moving out,
OK, unfortunately we're moving out of the White House.
I had the right to do it in my opinion
and in my lawyer's opinion and everything else.
They released Hillary Clinton, she hammered her phones.
She used all sorts of acid testing and everything else.
They call it bleach bit,
but it's essentially acid that will destroy everything,
you know, within 10 miles.
Acid clothes, underwear, state secrets.
Everybody does it. But argument,
though, much like the idea that acid destroys everything in
10 miles,
might normally be literally laughed out of a normal court,
right?
But remember, this is Aileen Kenner we're talking about,
folks. She's a Trump appointee who has repeatedly shown a
willingness and eagerness even
to allow the disgraced ex
president's team all sorts of latitude by entertaining their various
motions.
So here we are, delay after delay after delay after
delay,
one afternoon closer to Election Day
2024, one afternoon closer to another.
Potential legal off ramp for a man accused of serious
crimes and in this instance ones with very serious national
security implications.
It's where we start today with some of our favorite
experts and friends.
Former acting solicitor general, MSNBC legal analyst.
Now Katyal is back. Plus former FBI counterintelligence agent Pete
Struck is back with me at the table once again.
MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin,
who I've had the pleasure of watching you juggle this
story and some breaking news for us.
Well, we're crashing that. We'll get to that in a
second.
But start with what is a pattern.
Another seemingly successful, if audacious and outrageous,
effort at delay on Trump's part.
Well and and facilitated by Judge Alien.
Cannon, right? This is a case,
Nicole. When you file a motion to dismiss in a
criminal case,
or even in the civil case,
it's not required that you have oral argument.
Judges all over the country in federal courts dispose of
these things without oral argument all the time.
Judge Alien Cannon, on the other hand,
took almost an entire court day to talk about two
motions that many of us would tell you is
borderline frivolous, if not frivolous.
And so the fact that she's even holding this hearing
is a facilitation of the delay,
stall and ignore tactics that we've seen from Trump all
along in this case and his other ones.
I mean, look, Evan Corcoran is one of the key
witnesses here.
That was Trump's own lawyer,
Neil. What is Jack Smith doing not trying to move
this
out of? I
mean, this judge has been overruled and overturned by an
extremely conservative circuit.
Why are Why are we still here?
Because the Justice Department, Nicole doesn't like to ever file
such motions.
They don't want to be seen as playing favorites with
particular judges.
They just take the random assignment and it's almost unheard
of them for them to do something else.
This case might actually test it,
given Judge Cannon's decisions last year and what she seems
to be doing now.
I mean, just the idea then just to pick up
on something,
Lisa said. The idea that we're having a full day
hearing on an absurd motion like this.
I mean, the only things that Donald Trump's arguments today
merit are an eye roll and a swift denial,
certainly not a day of hearing like.
I mean, I think I'm a pretty good lawyer.
There's no way I could win this junk that Trump
was saying today.
Well, I mean, so here we are,
Junk. Aileen Cannon. I don't think she's presided over very
many trials,
let alone complicated national security trials dealing with classified
documents. At some point, Pete struck,
this isn't about Aileen Cannon.
It's about the rest of us.
Why? Why are we? Why are we still here?
Well, I think both Lisa and you and Neil have
put them a
fine point on it. I mean,
the fact of the matter is,
if this case had been brought
in districts where classified information is routinely dealt with in
the District of Columbia or the Eastern District of Virginia,
this never would have had a hearing.
And the fact is, over the course of my career,
I've used 793 E the statute at play here in
many dozens of districts in several circuits,
and there's never been a successful challenge to constitutionality.
These are in fact, borderline,
if not complete, frivolous arguments.
I think regardless of whatever Judge Cannon's personal motives are,
I think absolutely One, her broad experience,
but to her specific inexperience with classified information is leading
to these delays.
And what I'm reminded of as well is as frequently
as an FBI agent,
you go out and you can do a lot of
interviews,
but at some point you've got to sit down and
write those interviews up.
And you're generating, as you're running around talking to people,
you're generating this huge administrative backlog.
Well, she's doing the same thing in many respects in
her courtroom.
We've had a lot of motions.
We have several more coming up and there as we
wait for rulings on these motions because she's decided to
have these hearings that backlog that's sitting down and putting
pin to paper is growing and growing and growing.
And there's absolutely no way in my mind that we
see trial in Mar a Lago prior to the election.
And what's interesting is there's
there's a different timeline, right?
I mean, the witnesses. One of the witnesses did an
extraordinary interview with Caitlin Collins this week.
Let me show you some of what Brian Butler believe.
He's employee number five, had to say about the criminal
conspiracy to hide classified state secrets and then obstruct the
investigation to get those documents back.
I remember him saying, hey,
by the way, Walt's coming tomorrow.
Oh, cool. That's great. I
was like, OK, it wasn't till the following day
when we're how walking, he's like,
hey, by the way, it's a secret.
Don't tell anybody while it's coming.
And
why? Well, he needs me to.
He needs me to find something out before he gets
here.
Oh, what's that? He needs me to You know how
long the camera footage is saved at Mar A Lago.
And I'm like, oh, that's that's odd.
Why why do you need the camera footage?
Why do you need to know how long it's saved?
And his response was, I think they're looking for somebody
that was there.
This was extraordinary. Pete struck.
He also details an amazing scene and it's it's the
way he tells it.
It's it's almost out of a screenplay where he and
Walt are both taking things to the jet to go
to Bedminster in New Jersey.
Brian is taking luggage with
Sherlock Hair Products in them.
But Walt's taking classified state secrets.
Why isn't there a New Jersey prosecution?
Well, Nicole, I think that's a good question because we
need to find out whether or not there were materials
moved to New Jersey.
I think it is clear now that investigators and prosecutors
likely have several good indicators that material was taken to
New Jersey.
But remember, to get to that point you need,
you know, there was a search warrant served at Mar
a Lago.
And to get that warrant there had to be an
affidavit demonstrating to a judge that there was problem caused.
Not only that there was contraband or fruits or elements
of a crime at the location,
but it was at the location at the time of
the application for the search warrant.
So the question becomes, one,
what sort of information and solid information did prosecutors have
that material,
classified material had been moved to Bedminster?
And two, did they get that information in a fresh
enough sort of time frame to be able to go
to a judge and say,
look, your Honor, not only do we believe that this
classified material was moved to Bedminster,
but it was yesterday or it was last week.
And if you start having a span of months or
several months,
that becomes a harder argument to make for a magistrate.
And that's my suspicion of why they didn't pursue a
search warrant and couldn't pursue a search warrant.
At Bedbenzer.
There's some reporting that to me is almost sort of
macabre and funny.
Trump is attending the trial today as part of a
broader political strategy to make it seem as if he's
being in prison.
I mean, not for long.
He's almost off the hook here.
It doesn't seem like there's a very good chance there'll
be a trial
before Election Day in any of these instances.
There's a brand new delay in the Bragg case.
What is? And and you've actually reported this anecdotally of
his conduct in the New York
courthouse where his company was tried by New York Attorney
General Letitia James.
It's now made sort of a campaign memo as a
political strategy.
Absolutely. And that's where the theater of the absurd is
going on.
The political and the legal is converging into one.
And even though he can't use a federal courthouse,
Nicole, the same way that he used that courthouse here
downtown where Letitia James tried her case,
he is doing everything but holding a press conference on
the courthouse steps here.
His very presence there is a theatrical political event.
I do want to point out there's one small bit
of good news from today,
which is that even Aileen Cannon has her limits as
to the absurdity of Trump arguments.
You know, one of their favorite arguments here is that
the Presidential Records Act basically exculpates him because it immunizes
him
if he decided in his mind that these records were
all personal.
And even she had a problem with that at one
point.
Turning to Todd Blanche and saying this is where your
argument,
Mr. Blanche, seems to falter,
because not only is it absurd on its face,
but the analogies that they were drawing to,
for example, what we all shorthand as the Clinton Socks
case,
it's not even remotely comparable.
Bill Clinton kept audio tapes in a sock drawer
with the historic they were audio tapes of his conversations
with Taylor Branch the historian
and the PRA says that Diaries,
which Judge Amy Berman Jackson said these were equivalent to,
are expressly excluded from the category of what records are
presidential.
We are far afield from that.
Diaries and classified documents talking about nuclear secrets are not
the same.
And even Judge Cannon knows it Well,
I mean.