Former President Donald Trump expressed anger on Thursday about some individuals “disrespecting” Judge Aileen Cannon.
“Crooked Joe Biden and his crew of Hacks and Thugs, led by Merrick Garland and Deranged Jack Smith, are working overtime to try to illegally intimidate and harass respected Federal Judge Aileen Cannon,” Trump wrote in a post to TruthSocial. “They are calling her terrible names, wrongfully threatening her with Impeachment, and disrespecting her, all because they want her to act like the dishonest, politically biased, and conflicted Judges in New York, and not like the fair and impartial Judge that she is.”
The post by Trump comes amid ongoing disputes between Special Counsel Jack Smith and Judge Cannon, who is overseeing the former president’s case in Florida involving his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential race, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. He has denied any wrongdoing in the case and has said the documents he retained were personal.
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Last month, Judge Cannon filed an order asking both the prosecution and defense to provide possible instructions for the jury relating to the charges against the former president. In the jury instructions, Cannon appeared to suggest to the jury that they are permitted to consider the classified documents to be Trump’s personal items, under the Presidential Records Act.
In response, Smith filed a strong rebuke against the order saying that they “rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise.”
“Both scenarios rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise—namely, that the Presidential Records Act and in particular its distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘Presidential’ records, determines whether a former President is ‘authorized,’ under the Espionage Act, to possess highly classified documents and store them in an unsecure facility,” Smith’s office said.
Amid their disputes, some legal experts have suggested that Smith could move to call for Cannon’s recusal from the case.
Elie Honig, a legal commentator and attorney, appeared on CNN’s News Central last week and was asked if Smith could motion for Cannon to be removed, to which he said it’s “possible,” but would be “extraordinarily rare.”
“There is a procedure for this, and it can happen sometimes, where prosecutors will ask the judge or will ask an appeals court to remove a federal judge from a case,” Honig said. “First of all, it’s a pretty precipitous move; second of all, if you lose, you have a kind of awkward scenario where you’ve asked the judge to be kicked off.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s spokesperson via email for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.