(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Special Counsel Jack Smith scolded Judge Aileen Cannon after she demanded information on jury instructions from both his office and former President Donald Trump’s defense attorneys.
In a filing on Tuesday, Smith asserted that Cannon’s request was “wrong” and could potentially bias the verdict in favor of Trump. Cannon is presiding over the classified documents indictment filed by Smith against Trump.
As reported by several media outlets, last month Cannon instructed Smith and Trump to provide jury instructions outlining two potential scenarios related to the Presidential Records Act.
One scenario would have allowed jurors to review records and determine whether documents allegedly found at Mar-a-Lago are categorized as personal or presidential. The second scenario would have argued that U.S. presidents hold “sole authority” under the Presidential Records Act.
Trump has invoked the second defense to refute Smith’s claims that the documents found at his Mar-a-Lago residence belong to the federal government and the National Archives.
In the Tuesday filing, Smith criticized Cannon’s demands, stating: “Both scenarios rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise — namely, that the Presidential Records Act (‘PRA’), 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.”
Conservative journalist Julie Kelly commented on Twitter that a defense attorney described Smith’s filing as a “threat” to Cannon. “The tone Smith is taking with Cannon is no longer persuasion but outright threats. Unheard of dynamic btw DOJ and the bench,” she said on Wednesday.
Jack Smith’s response is hysterical (and not in a funny way in a desperate way) bc he knows he has little control over her decision related to final jury instructions.
And he is arguing the basis for Trump’s “unauthorized possession” of national defense material rests on Obama… pic.twitter.com/uVr0qxy8ex
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 3, 2024
Smith also argued in the filing that the scenarios demanded by Cannon, which echoed Trump’s defense, were not based on “facts.”
He further wrote, “It is a post hoc justification that was concocted more than a year after he left the White House, and his invocation in this Court of the PRA is not grounded in any decision he actually made during his presidency to designate as personal any of the records charged.”
