Christy, do you think this question of whether Jack Smiths
appointment is constitutional is worthy of the level of scrutiny
and time Judge Cannon is spending here?
I mean, she's not only spending a whole day on
it, she's also calling it outside legal experts.
I guess she would call them, Yeah, none of this
is necessary.
When you go to a meeting and you say that
meeting really should have been an e-mail.
This is a hearing that really should have been an
order, a summary order that was just denying Trump's motion.
Think the statutory text is clear.
And to the extent there are any questions about the
statutory text giving the age of the authority to appoint
a special counsel, USV.
Nixon cleared that up.
This is the Supreme Court saying that, that that's what
the statute said.
And other courts have followed that since.
Appellate courts have followed that since.
Why this District Court judge thinks that she would have
a different interpretation when the Supreme Court has already addressed
it and appellate courts have already addressed it is beyond
me.
And really, it seems like the only basis that that
I can think of for why you would have all
these outside parties coming in who are making crazy arguments.
The outside parties tried this actually in the Supreme Court
when they said you shouldn't even listen to the presidential
immunity petition because Jack Smith has no more authority to
argue before this court than Taylor Swift does.
That's ludicrous.
You don't need a lot of great to know that's
a ludicrous argument.
She should be laughing this out of court.
They should have not been even allowed in the court
to make this argument.
But again, delay is the name of the game here.
And rather than talking about Donald Trump's egregious conduct in
the classified documents case, we're talking about Jack Smith.
It's deflection, it's distraction.
It's delay and it's unnecessary.
Lisa, what about this argument that Trump's team is trying
to make that the special counsel has too much independence
from the Justice Department and would make him essentially a
superior officer and he's not somebody who has been appointed
and confirmed by the Senate.
Is there any merit to that argument?
If past is prologue?
There isn't, Anna.
And here's why.
What we see today as special counsels was precededed in
history by an independent counsel statute that has since lapped.
When we had independent counsels like Ken Starr, for example,
they operated with much more independence from the Department of
Justice than today's special counsels do.
And yet they were still found by courts to be
sufficiently inferior officers to have been constitutionally appointed.
There have been so many things that this judge in
the classified documents case has done that has raised eyebrows.
I think you could say, Kimberly, let me take through
some of the other decisions this judge has made.
It goes back to even before Trump was indicted, she
appointed a special master to review the classified documents that
were seized from Mar a Lago, which an appeals court
that had two Trump appointed justices judges on them later
rejected unanimously.
They slapped her down for that.
And then she asked both Trump in the government since
she's gotten this case, to submit jury instructions, which experienced
lawyers said was odd, especially the timing of those since
we don't have a trial date yet.
She keeps entertaining these defense motions that other legal experts
say have no merit.
Back in May, she said she couldn't even set a
trial date, delaying the whole trial indefinitely, even though both
parties had said they would be ready for the trial
as soon as the summer.
And then yesterday, we learned she was asked to step
aside by other federal judges and said, no, what are
people supposed to make of all of this?
Yeah.
I mean, look, she is relatively new in this type
of role.
She doesn't have a lot of experience in trying cases.
Let alone one as complex as one being brought under
the Espionage Act.
But at the same time, that in itself is not
a transgression.
Every judge is new at some point.
But what she is showing time and time again with
all of the things that you just laid out is
that she seems to be someone who gets easily diverted,
focuses on sort of the minutiae of a case, and
that sort of parallel realizes it and slows it to
a halt.
This is something that other judges and, and other litigants
before her have said they've experienced in the past.
And we're seeing it again here in this case.
Perhaps that is one reason why she was cautioned against
taking this case when it was assigned to her.
But, you know, particularly this argument today and also this
other argument about a law that has nothing to do
with this case, which is still pending.
It's a, it's an order that is still a motion
that's still pending before her and has been for months
are evidence that something is really amiss here, in my
opinion.
Christy, has this judge done anything that has crossed a
legal or ethical line that would warrant Jack Smith to
try to now get her removed from the case?
No, not yet.
And I think the reason not yet is because a
lot of times she doesn't actually make a decision.
She punts the decision and says, well, you know, I'm
not really sure I want to decide this yet.
Maybe down the line I'll take a closer look at
it.
And she does that, I think intentionally so that she
can't get appealed and they can't bring it up to
the 11th Circuit.
And because she has continued to insulate her decisions in
that way, it it just, it, it seems very nefarious.
Again, if you want to make a decision and you
believe that you've made the right decision, you've done all
of this analysis, then stand by that decision, make it
and have it be appealed If if the other side,
if one of the parties disagrees with it, but she
doesn't do that.
It's it's just seems very calculated for somebody who seems
to be, you know, new and inexperienced.
It seems like she has given a lot of thought
to how to try to insulate herself from review.
Let me pivot now to developments here in New York
where the men at NDA, Alvin Bragg, just filed a
response or motion to try to keep a gag order
in place for Trump in this new filing.
Lisa, he writes, quote, the recent threat activity directly connected
to defendants.
Dangerous rhetoric about this prosecution includes bomb threats at the
homes of two people involved in this case on April
15th, 2024, the first day of trial.
It includes an online post depicting sniper sites on people
involved in this case, and it includes other recent online
posts and communications directed to the attorney, the District Attorney
or Dany employees involved in this prosecution.
That we will kill you all.
This is really remarkable stuff.
It's really remarkable stuff.
And it's also very necessary stuff.
Because in moving to lift the gag order, one of
the things that the Trump attorney said was all of
the data that had been provided by the DA's office
to try and justify that component of the gag order
that was geared toward protecting the career prosecutors, their families,
courthouse staff.
That data all came from 2023.
And they pointed to a February 2024 affidavit by a
gentleman at the NYPD named Nicholas Pastilli.
Well, Mr.
Pastilli now has a new affidavit dated today in which
he is providing the information that you just cited.
He also says that of 289 threat cases that have
been logged by the NYPD's Threat Assessment and Protection Unit,
61 of them involved threats to the DA so far
this year, in 2024 alone, 61 threats to the DA's
office alone.
And then he goes on to say that four of
them were referred for further investigation in partnership with a
prosecutor's office.
I take that to mean those threats emanated from outside
New York and therefore justified the involvement of a prosecutor
outside New York.
We know that one of them, for example, came from
a man out very far outside New York on the
West Coast of the country, who was killed earlier this
year in a standoff with the FBI, but who had
issued a threat of that nature, very serious death threat
to the DA.
So this is the DA's attempt to keep the gag
order in place with respect to the counsel in the
case.
And I should note that while the threats are often
geared toward the DA himself, he is not someone who
is covered by the gag order.
The president or the former president rather can continue to
speak about DA Alvin Bragg and they point that out
as well and saying that the gag order is somehow
a collusive activity between President Joe Biden and Manhattan DA
Alvin Bragg toward the president, political opponent, former President Donald
Trump.
That claim is a lie is an exact sentence that
appears in this brief no stronger language I can think
of that has appeared in this case to date.
And I pressed to think about language that strong from
a government office and any case I've seen before.
But the the words that is a lie.
That claim is a lie taking on that allegation that
Trump keeps putting out there that in some way the
District Attorney has been colluding with the Biden administration.
Kimberly, does any of this have any bearing on Trump
sentencing next month?
It possibly could.
It could if he is seen to continue to violate
the terms of his current gag order as it's being
considered.
It also can have repercussions in terms of his release
qualifications in the other cases.
But I want to point out something that's really important
about what Lisa is talking about.
The reason that this or this motion is so strong
and contains all of this issues is that the 1st
Amendment really the the 1st Amendment protections of someone, particularly
a political candidate is really strong.
And so it's one thing to have a gag order
during the process of a trial.
It's an even higher standard to have one after the
trial is concluded.
And you can clearly see here that the DA is
trying to make that case and say, yes, this is
unusual and he has First Amendment protections, but there are
limits when it comes to people's safety.
Kimberly Atkins, soar, Lisa Rubin and Christy Greenberg, ladies, thank
you all so much.
Up next.