what the fuck are you doing, Aileen?

Donald Trump stole shit he wasn’t allowed to have. end of story

Number One Trump Fangirl Judge Aileen Cannon continues to fuck the Big Classified Document Theft Trial straight into the ground.

inexperienced and way out of her depth — and in obvious thrall of the defendant — the judge has been issuing incoherent statements, misunderstanding basic statutes, and making inane requests of both the defense and prosecution lawyers.

most infuriatingly, she’s refusing to rule on anything, kicking every can down the road. Trump will make some ridiculous claim, and instead of immediately slapping it down, Cannon will stick it in her back pocket and make a pinky-swear promise to get back to us about it real soon now. unanswered filings are piling up, pushing any possibility of a trial further into the future. yesterday, she declined to set a trial date.

the Man Who Convicts War Criminals In The Hague has finally lost his famous cool — and late last night filed a writ of shit or get off the pot, Aileen.

at the center of this donnybook is Donny Trump’s wackadoodle insistence that the Presidential Records Act says that just by touching any document, they magically become his personal property. (this is actually the opposite of what the Presidential Records Act states.)

any other judge in the multiverse would have rejected this dumbfuck notion in about two nanoseconds, and ruled immediately from the bench — but not Judge Aileen. nope, she’s actually taking it seriously.

in fact, she’s taking it so seriously that she asked Jack Smith to play make-believe along with her, and pretend that it were true.

On March 18, Cannon released proposed instructions to the jury suggesting that Trump may have had a legal right under the Presidential Records Act [PRA] to declare presidential records as personal property after leaving office.

A judge’s instruction to the jury frames the issues they must review before they consider a person’s guilt or innocence.

Smith was all fuck this bullshit and fuck it hard.

Judge Aileen Cannon’s proposed jury instructions “rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise,” the chief prosecutor in Donald Trump’s classified documents case has said.

Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote to Cannon, a Trump appointee, stating that her proposed instructions risked “distort[ing] the trial” that Trump is facing in Florida.

most importantly, Jack Smith is urging Judge Cannon to hurry up and make a ruling on this, so he can go running to the 11th Circuit and appeal the shit out of it.

Jack Smith just let Judge Cannon know he is ready to file an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit based on her unlawful rulings and if she refuses to rule he will file a writ of mandamus. Smith is done with the games and is calling out Cannon in his most sharply worded motion yet.

a writ of mandamus? I had to look it up, too.

A (writ of) mandamus is an order from a court to an inferior government official ordering the government official to properly fulfill their official duties or correct an abuse of discretion.

Jack Smith has no more fucks to give and I am so fucking here for it.

it’s maddening that this trial is stuck in virtual limbo. this should have been the first trial to go, because of all of Trump’s rampant criming, this one is the easiest-peasiest for the public to understand.

there doesn’t need to be any legal hair-splitting over what exactly does insurrection mean or is begging a secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes, is that really interference?

this one’s cut and dried. Trump stole shit he wasn’t allowed to have: boxes upon boxes of our country’s most closely guarded secrets.

Donny was asked nicely to return them. he refused. he hid them. he lied about them. he ignored a subpoena. he hid them again. he pawed through them. he kept them in his office desk. he wrote to-do notes on them. he stored them in the unspeakably ugly shitter of his Florida golf motel. he waved them in the faces of randos at his New Jersey wife cemetery. he bragged about their contents to his plutocrat golf cronies. he ordered the pool boy and the butler to destroy evidence — all while claiming at first the the FBI planted them, and then later that he took them because they belonged to him.

none of these are the actions of an innocent person.

Donald Trump is guilty as fuck, and America’s voters are being denied the opportunity to have a verdict before they head to the polls this November — all because the most important trial in the history of our country has been put in the hands of an inexperienced, starry-eyed fangirl who is too busy scrawling Mrs. Aileen Trump over and over across the cover sheets of her briefings to actually do her job.

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.