Many people have wondered how Trump managed to wind up in extremist nut-ball Aileen Cannon’s court room far from Mar-A-Lago, where the issue at hand— the FBI raid— took place. On Tuesday, Jose Pagliery tried answering that question for Daily Beast readers. Trump’s lawyer drove an hour up the coast, to another judicial district, to file with Trump appointee Cannon in person, lying that the computer system was down and forgetting to mention that another judge in Trump’s home district was already handling a “related” case. Judge-shopping and finding an ideological crackpot like Cannon was a “home-run” for Trump.
More recently, Trump’s had a couple of judicial strikeouts. With so many law suits pending at once, it’s sometimes hard for the public to keep up with Trump’s various cases. We’re get to Judge Carter in a moment. Let’s check in Trump’s legal problems in New York first. He tried getting the Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit against the Trump Organization reassigned to a MAGA judge like Cannon. Motion denied: “Administrative Judge Adam Silvera ruled that state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron was properly— “consistent with court procedure”— assigned the case. This is the case the AG’s office brought to keep Trump from moving material assets out of the state before the end of the fraud case, which will have a hearing on Halloween. No doubt Trump was hoping that could move that one down to Cannon as well. No such luck. Engoron well knows just what a dirt-bag Trump has always been and knows all the sordid details of this particular fraud case.
More bad news: he was forced into being deposed in the E. Jean Carroll rape case, disguised as a defamation suit. “After U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rebuffed Trump’s request to delay his deposition and discovery until the appeals court rules on the government intervening, Trump was deposed in the case on Wednesday, and his attorney Alina Habba said he answered questions in the deposition and did not invoke his Fifth Amendment rights. The case is scheduled to go to trial on February 6, 2023, though it’s still possible a ruling from the D.C. Court of Appeals could derail Carroll’s case and end the litigation, if it decides Trump was acting within the scope of his presidency when he made the allegedly defamatory comments.”
More bad news: John Eastman, bad news for America, bad news for mankind and, finally, bad news for Señor Trumpanzee. U.S. District Judge David Carter ruled yesterday that Eastman turn over 33 more e-mails to the House J-6 Select Committee and indicated that Señor T signed a legal document, under oath, with Big Lie voter fraud claims that he knew were false. That could put Trump in some legal peril. Carter: “Four emails demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the January 6 vote. The evidence confirms that this effort was undertaken in at least one lawsuit filed in Georgia… The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public.” Not unrelated: how does a law school-- even at Chapman-- hire John Eastman to be a dean?
Yesterday, NY Times reporters Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer wrote that “The committee has fought for months to get access to hundreds of Eastman’s emails, viewing him as the intellectual architect of plans to subvert the 2020 election, including Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. Repeatedly, the panel has argued that a ‘crime-fraud exception’ pierces the typical attorney-client privilege that often protects communications between lawyers and clients… Judge Carter wrote on Wednesday that the crime-fraud exception applied to a number of the emails related to Trump and Eastman’s ‘efforts to delay or disrupt the Jan. 6 vote’ and ‘their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.’”
Judge Carter found four emails that “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the Jan. 6 vote.”
In one of them, Trump’s lawyers advised him that simply having a challenge to the election pending in front of the Supreme Court could be enough to delay the final tally of Electoral College votes from Georgia.
“This email,” Judge Carter wrote, “read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings through the courts.”
…[One] episode was the latest example of how Trump was repeatedly told that his claims of widespread voter fraud were false and often pressed forward with them anyway. His attorney general at the time, William Barr, informed him at least three times that his accusations about fraud were unfounded, as did other top officials at the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office and the Trump campaign.
Judge Carter’s ruling came as part of a federal lawsuit Eastman filed at the beginning of the year, seeking to bar the committee from obtaining his emails as part of its inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
In a previous ruling, issued in March, Judge Carter offered a sweeping analysis of how Trump and Eastman most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress on Jan. 6 and conspiring to defraud the United States.
Today Trump was barking mad, frothing at the mouth, howling at the wind and the moon He called Judge Carter a “partisan hack,” not a smart thing to say to a judge trying your case. He raged on his scammy, nearly-bankrupt pretend Twitter site:
UPDATE by Patrick Toomey
According to the Daily Beast piece, Lindsey Halligan personally filed the case in Ft. Lauderdale, over 40 miles to the south of Mar-a-Lago. According to Ms. Halligan’s Florida Bar listing, her office is roughly 1 mile from the Ft. Lauderdale federal courthouse.
Halligan’s Bar listing says that she was admitted in 2014. It doesn’t indicate that she is employed in a law firm (listings normally indicate your firm). Her background appears to be in defending insurance claims. In short, an apparently unaffiliated relative newbie (for purposes of representing a former president) with no apparent background in litigation of this nature hand-filed at a courthouse near her office. People stopped hand-filing several years ago, probably before she was admitted. None of it makes any sense.
Comments