“Judge Aileen Cannon Plays a Dangerous Game” with Trump’s False FBI Claims, Says Former Prosecutor
Judge Aileen Cannon is playing a dangerous game by allowing Donald Trump to make false statements about the FBI, a former prosecutor has said.
Joyce Vance, who served as a U.S. Attorney under former President Barack Obama, warned that a Trump supporter could injure an FBI agent after the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsely said that the agency was instructed to use lethal force against him during a raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Cannon, a Trump appointee, is overseeing the Mar-a-Lago case, in which special counsel Jack Smith accuses the former president of illegally retaining classified documents, hoarding them at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and obstructing attempts by federal officials to retrieve them.
Trump 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. Smith has filed a motion in court seeking to amend Trump’s bail conditions so that the Republican can no longer be permitted to make false statements about the FBI.
That followed the unsealing of an FBI search warrant application, which said that agents were trained to use lethal force if necessary. Such language is standard for such applications and also appears on one when FBI agents were seeking to recover presidential papers from President Joe Biden.
Cannon has already received submissions from prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers and she has delayed the bail adjustment request by three weeks while she requests further submissions. “No one will ever accuse her of dealing with matters in an expeditious fashion.
But she plays a dangerous and disingenuous game here. Someone could get hurt in the intervening three weeks,” Vance wrote on Sunday in her legal blog, Civil Discourse. Vance has been a frequent critic of the former president. “Special counsel Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon—again—to bar Trump from making statements that endanger law enforcement in the classified documents case,” Vance wrote.
