Jack Smith knows what he’s doing when it comes to dealing with Judge Aileen Cannon
Once Jack Smith decided to bring his first criminal indictment against Donald Trump in the 11th Circuit in Miami, I wasn’t particularly surprised when it was announced that Judge Aileen Cannon had been initially assigned to the case. There are only a relative handful of federal judges in each circuit. I knew the odds were pretty decent. And if I knew that, then so did Jack Smith when he decided to move the case from Washington DC to Miami.
That’s right, Jack Smith knew there was a good chance that he’d initially draw Cannon for this case when he moved it to Miami, and he decided to make that move anyway. Keep that in mind over the next few days, every time you hear the latest doomsday hysteria about how Cannon is somehow magically going to get Trump off the hook and we’re all doomed.
In fact, you should have this sentence on a constant loop in your mind: Jack Smith knew there was a good chance that he’d initially draw Cannon for this case when he moved it to Miami, and he decided to make that move anyway. Why is this so important? Ask yourself these questions: is Jack an idiot? Is this guy a hapless naive rube? Is he a helpless damsel in distress? Does he have a history of making stupid strategic decisions that cause him to lose cases?
If your answer to all of the above questions is “no” then you need to accept that he knew what he was doing when he moved the case. Look at Smith’s indictment. The guy is overwhelmingly detail oriented. He’s constructed this indictment to account for every possible monkey wrench that Trump’s side could throw at it. Given that he’s this detail oriented, there is a 100% chance that he and his team also came up with a comprehensive plan for how to deal with Cannon if they happened to draw her as a judge.
We don’t yet know what Jack Smith’s plan looks like. We don’t know if he’ll file to have her removed from the case, before or after Tuesday’s arraignment. But we do know that if Smith doesn’t attempt to have her removed, it’ll be because he’s confident he can swiftly work around anything improper that she might try to do. It’s not difficult to figure out how Smith would do that. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals already read Cannon the riot act last year over her failed attempt at suppressing evidence in this same exact case, and promptly reversed everything she tried to do. Smith can easily have the Court of Appeals quickly undo Cannon’s moves in this case. And now that Cannon has seen how hard the appeals court came down on her last time, she may be scared enough to simply let the case play out legitimately.
The notion that Jack Smith is some naive hapless rube, who doesn’t know how to overcome the all-powerful Aileen Cannon and her evil magic wand, is so simplistic as to be almost infantile. And yet this laugh out loud children’s ghost story is somehow the dominant narrative being hyped by the media and pundit class right now, to try to scare you into thinking that Trump is going to “get away with it all” at any minute, so you’ll be too afraid to change the channel.
As always, your job is not to fall for this crap. If you want to be able to accurately understand where any given situation is actually heading, it’s generally as simple as focusing solely on the things that dictate that situation’s outcome, and dismissing the other 95% of it as mere noise. When it comes to this particular situation, only two things matter: 1) Jack Smith knew there was a good chance that he’d initially draw Cannon for this case when he moved it to Miami, and he decided to make that move anyway, and 2) Jack Smith is not an idiot. That’s it. There are no other factors at play here. Once you figure that out, it’s easy enough to figure out that Smith has a solid strategy for Cannon and will prevail, and that one way or the other Cannon will be of very little relevance to this story. Everything else about this story is just ratings-driven noise.
