Jack Smith Hits Back at Judge Cannon’s Dangerous Order on Trump Case

Special Counsel Jack Smith on Thursday night warned that the judge in Donald Trump’s classified documents case has made a “clear error” that could put witnesses at risk.

Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, ruled that some unredacted discovery documents should be made available to Trump’s legal team. Those documents could expose sensitive information, including the names of potential witnesses.

It’s hardly surprising that Smith has spoken out about the ways in which Cannon’s decision could end very badly. In a court filing on Thursday, the special counsel urged the judge to reconsider.

“That discovery material, if publicly docketed in unredacted form as the Court has ordered, would disclose the identities of numerous potential witnesses, along with the substance of the statements they made to the FBI or the grand jury, exposing them to significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment, as has already happened to witnesses, law enforcement agents, judicial officers, and Department of Justice employees whose identities have been disclosed in cases in which defendant Trump is involved,” he wrote.

Smith also reminded Cannon of an Eleventh Circuit decision that goes against her recent decision.

“The Eleventh Circuit has held that the compelling-interest standard applied by the Court does not apply to ‘documents filed in connection with motions to compel discovery,’ which instead may be sealed or redacted simply upon a showing of ‘good cause,’” he wrote.

The Eleventh Circuit, coincidentally, is the same court that once struck down Cannon’s decision to grant Trump’s request to appoint a special master in the classified documents case.

It won’t be hard for Smith to demonstrate the “good cause” for not releasing those documents. Throughout his legal trials, Trump has made a habit out of harassing courtroom staff, plaintiffs, and witnesses.

The threats that Trump can bring to bear against his perceived enemies are so well documented that legal experts have raised the alarm about the safety of witnesses and jurors in his future trials—and jurists have acted on their advice. In the E. Jean Carroll trial that wrapped up last month, the jury was partially sequestered and fully anonymous. Jurors were warned not to share their names even with each other, using numbers instead. Judge Lewis Kaplan took those steps precisely because he was worried about Trump’s behavior.

Moments after the jury delivered its massive $83.3 million verdict against Trump, Kaplan gave them an ominous warning: “My advice to you is that you never disclose that you were on this jury.”

Trump is facing 40 counts for keeping classified documents long after he left the White House. His aide, Walt Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago employee, Carlos De Oliveira, are also facing charges.

New York Representative Elise Stefanik is ready and willing to put Donald Trump before country and state.

On Thursday, the MAGA lawmaker all but admitted she would definitely have done a coup and not certified the 2020 presidential election results on January 6 if she were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes.

“Had you been vice president on January 6, 2021, what would you have done?” asked CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.

“I would not have done what Mike Pence did, I don’t think that was the right approach. I specifically stand by what I said on the House floor, and I stand by my statement, which was that there was unconstitutional overreach, there was unconstitutional overreach in states like Pennsylvania,” Stefanik responded.

“I think it’s very important that we continue to stand up for the Constitution and have legal and secure elections, which we did not have in 2020, and tens of millions of Americans agree with me, Katy,” she added.

Stefanik is seen as a leading contender for Trump’s vice presidential pick, and it’s clear this interview was meant for his eyes.

Her throwaway line of claiming to stand for the protection of the U.S. Constitution directly contradicts Pence’s own defense of his decision to certify the votes, effectively making Joe Biden the next president.

“By God’s grace, I did my duty that day,” he told the Des Moines Register in August. “I had no right to overturn the election. And the American people deserve to know that the president asked me to choose him over keeping my oath to the Constitution, but I chose the Constitution. And I always will.”

Somehow, it’s the second time this week that one of Trump’s top contenders in his veepstakes said they’d do a coup. On Sunday, Senator J.D. Vance gave a shockingly similar answer, effectively arguing for American autocracy rather than democracy.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said, referring to the fake pro-Trump electors that some states’ Republicans tried to send to Washington.

“That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

Tucker Carlson lost complete control of his softball interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as pretty much everyone expected.

After spending roughly 30 minutes ranting about world history via Kremlin talking points, Putin suddenly flipped the script, mocking Carlson directly for applying—and failing—to join the CIA.

While on a tangent about how the ousting of former pro-Moscow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan revolution was really the CIA’s fault, Putin took a pause to troll the conservative talk show host.

“The organization you wanted to join back in the day as I understand. We should thank God they didn’t let you in. Although it is a serious organization I understand,” the former KGB agent said through a translator.

Carlson attempted to join the intelligence agency after leaving Trinity College in Connecticut, but was rejected on the basis that “the real-life agency, unlike its fictional counterparts, prefers not to hire young men who are gabby and insubordinate,” according to a 2017 profile of Carlson by The New Yorker.

The whole setup was an embarrassing twist for the former Fox News anchor, who spent years sucking up to the de facto dictator, advocating against U.S. support for Ukraine, and calling for Americans to revisit their prejudices against Putin and the Russian government—even after Russian military officials were caught interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—helping the commentator gain airtime in Russian state-run media outlets.

Carlson spent the better part of the much-hyped interview, which aired Thursday evening, sitting and listening while Putin ranted and raved, failing to press the indicted war criminal on any legitimate or worthwhile topics. Instead, the conversation sprawled across the concept of God, the Russian soul, and what Putin thought of U.S. President Joe Biden. It was the first time Putin had sat down for an interview with Western media since Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Putin also mentioned that his country would be open to a prisoner exchange to release Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained for almost a year on espionage charges for reporting on the nation.

Ahead of the interview’s release, White House officials attempted to dampen the messaging.

“Remember, you’re listening to Vladimir Putin. And you shouldn’t take at face value anything he has to say,” said White House national security spokesman John Kirby.

Meanwhile, another American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, has been jailed in the country since October 18 for allegedly failing to register as a foreign agent, despite the fact that she also holds Russian citizenship.

But Putin—who effortlessly navigated the propaganda spot—clearly intended to use the segment as leverage over Americans and Russians. On Friday, Russian school students were spotted watching the interview in history classes.

The Department of Justice investigation on President Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal concluded Thursday with no charges for the commander in chief, but the subsequent report may pose bigger problems for his reelection campaign.

The 388-page report, which followed a year-long investigation by special counsel Robert Hur, effectively condemned the 81-year-old president as having a memory with “significant limitations,” noting that if Biden were to face trial he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Over the course of the report, Hur painted a picture of a man who could not remember with precision when his vice presidency under President Barack Obama began or when it ended. His memory “appeared hazy” when recalling his stance over the war in Afghanistan, and he mistook one of his former key allies, General Karl Eikenberry, for someone he had a “real difference” of opinion with. But political minutiae were not the only topics Biden had trouble recalling, apparently also failing to remember, “even within several years,” when his son Beau died.

“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” the report noted.

A letter from Biden’s legal team, included in the report, simultaneously applauds the decision not to charge Biden while condemning the report as an inaccurate assessment of Biden’s mental clarity, citing the questionable timing of Hur’s interviews.

“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” the attorneys wrote.

“In fact there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of hours. This is especially true under the circumstances, which you do not mention in your report … that his interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel,” they added.

In his own statement, the president reaffirmed that narrative, claiming his eagerness to satisfy the needs of the investigation came at the expense of multihour interviews in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“I was so determined to give the Special Counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Biden said.

Hur, a Trump appointee, was chosen by Attorney General Merrick Garland to conduct the investigation in an effort to avoid any naysaying over presumed political bias.

And while it may be tempting to brush off the unsettling descriptions as a contrived effort to make the Democratic incumbent look bad, Biden has only continued to make critical, memory-related gaffes. At a campaign event on Wednesday, Biden twice confused German Chancellor Angela Merkel with her dead predecessor, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. And just days before, Biden made a similar flub, also confusing French President Emmanuel Macron with his dead predecessor, former French President François Mitterrand.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy resurrected the Red Scare on Thursday, reminding everyone that McCarthyism never really died—just fell into a bit of a coma.

Republican lawmakers spent the better part of a Senate Judiciary hearing grilling Biden judicial nominee Melissa Dubose, but few more than Kennedy, who outright demanded to know if she was “still a Marxist.”

“I am not, nor have ever been, a Marxist,” replied DuBose.

But Kennedy wasn’t satisfied with that, instead citing a 2000 interview she gave to the “feminist press” Women’s Studies Quarterly, in which she told the interviewer that shortly after graduating Providence College, she began working at Little Connie’s, a local coffee shop, where she said students from a private, progressive high school had her “in a Marxist phase.”

“I had no idea that that interview was something that was going to be published,” DuBose said. “When I graduated from college, I immersed myself in a ton of political theory. I read Hobbes, I read Locke, I read Rousseau, I read Marx. I went through a phase where I was into Eastern religion—where I read the Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius.”

“So I suspect, and I don’t know that the quote in the article, I don’t know if she was referring to what I was studying at the time, but as a political science major and as a theorist, and as someone who was considering teaching a course in political theory, I had immersed myself,” she continued.

But Kennedy persisted.

“You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Hobbesian phase,’” he continued. “You didn’t say ‘I’m in my Rousseau phase,’ you said, ‘I was in my Marxist phase.’”

Senator Dick Durbin, however, was nonplussed by the line of attack, brushing it off as a routine element of judiciary hearings.

“That is a frequent question,” the Judiciary Committee chair said to reporters after the hearing, according to Courthouse News Service. “If someone said something in college, or even high school, that mentioned Marx in any context—or even alluded to Marxism —they are bound to be questioned by this committee.”

A Michigan lawmaker posted an overtly racist image on Tuesday, using his office’s official account to elevate a white supremacist conspiracy theory on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The image, which depicts Black silhouettes covering much of the world, with white silhouettes straddling small portions of Canada, Northern Europe, and Australia, was captioned, “The great replacement!” referring to a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that baselessly purports that nonwhite people, especially from Arab countries, are demographically replacing white populations.

Right-wing pundit Jack Posobiec initially posted the image, but Michigan state Representative Josh Schriver quickly reshared it, adding an emoji of a chart in decline.

Groups within his district weren’t happy about the apparent endorsement.

An independent support group of the Detroit City Football Club declared that Schriver was “not welcome” at their clubs.

“Absolutely go fuck yourself, Josh,” posted the account for the Northern Guard Supporters. “Your wife plays for our club with players from all ethnic backgrounds in a high minority population city and you’re pushing white supremacist propaganda.”

“We want to be extremely clear on this: you are not welcome at Keyworth or in DCFC,” they added.

Schriver continued to make questionable posts into Wednesday, claiming that he doesn’t “believe God is a racist but He does love the races.”

The freshman lawmaker took office in 2022, winning Michigan’s 66th House district—which has voted red since 1993—by a margin of nearly 30 percent over Democratic candidate Emily Busch.

Two different chapters of Moms for Liberty faced stinging losses this week in two strongholds, the latest events in the once powerful organization’s steady decline.

Moms for Liberty experienced a meteoric rise at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, as local chapters sprang up to push back against coronavirus restrictions in schools. The organization soon expanded to pushing book bans and opposing discussion of LGBTQ issues and race and diversity in classrooms, prompting the Southern Poverty Law Center to categorize Moms for Liberty as an extremist hate group.

But on Tuesday, the local chapter in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, shut down due to lack of interest. The chapter had 200 members when it first formed in 2021, but just three showed up at a diner in Allentown to vote to dissolve the group, The Daily Beast reported.

Members had begun drifting away after Covid-19 mandates were lifted nationwide, but the biggest blow came in November when the chapter’s preferred candidate in a school district board election lost badly. Attendance at chapter events nose-dived, with just 20 people showing up to the holiday party.

“I guess there wasn’t as much willingness to do the work that’s required to propel the movement forward,” the chapter founder, Janine Vicalvi, told the Beast in a story published Wednesday.

Participation also appears to be flagging for a key Moms for Liberty chapter in Florida. The Brevard County chapter was the national organization’s first chapter. A local group was already in action against Covid-19 regulations in schools when Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler founded Moms for Liberty in Florida. Descovich approached the Brevard County group about merging with Moms for Liberty, and the local group agreed.

But on Wednesday, the Brevard County school board held a meeting, in part to discuss a challenge to the books The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five. Only one Moms for Liberty member showed up.

All the other attendees spoke in favor of keeping the books on the shelves—and heavily criticized the parental rights organization. One attendee compared “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” in The Kite Runner to “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.”

The Moms for Liberty member did not speak and eventually snuck out of the room. The books were not banned.

The national Moms for Liberty organization still holds a lot of influence among politicians, with many Republican primary candidates speaking at the group’s annual summit last year. But Moms for Liberty has started to see its power wane in the past year, as the group was rocked by a sexual assault scandal.

Moms for Liberty endorsed 130 candidates for school boards nationwide during the 2023 elections. The vast majority of them lost. Meanwhile, Ziegler was ousted from the organization after she and her husband admitted they had had a consensual sexual relationship with another woman.

That woman accused Ziegler’s husband, Christian Ziegler, of assaulting her on a separate occasion. Christian Ziegler was voted out as Florida Republican Party chairman in January over the allegations.

Steps away from where a Donald Trump–backed mob attempted to thwart the 2020 presidential election results, in Washington, D.C., fans of the former president set up chairs and stood by in anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court hearing that would decide whether Colorado could ban Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential primary ticket.

Crowds grew from a couple dozen people to more than 100 overnight, with protesters braving frigid temperatures in order to show up, even though Trump himself was not expected to make an appearance.

Some mega pro-Trump fans drove from hundreds of miles away in order to attend, like Aranda Maher and her husband, who “left their children with grandparents and drove about 350 miles to Washington,” reported The New York Times.

“It was kind of spur of the moment,” Maher, 24, told the outlet, dressed in Ugg boots and pajamas.

Others made the trek more deliberately.

“My hope is that the Supreme Court has the courage to read the Constitution as it’s written, and not torture the text in defense of Trump,” Richard Zipper, a retired software engineer from Crofton, Maryland, told Politico.

Counterprotesters also made their mark outside the halls of the country’s highest judiciary, insisting that Trump be held accountable for his role in the January 6 riot.

“We’d like to see the Supreme Court uphold justice and read the law,” Jennifer Hobbs, a lawyer who drove down from New York, told Politico.

Trump, meanwhile, appeared optimistic about the proceedings, in an appearance outside his Florida estate.

“I thought the presentation today was a very good one. I think it was well received—I hope it was well received,” Trump told a gaggle of reporters outside Mar-a-Lago.

In December, Colorado’s Supreme Court issued a historic ruling removing Trump from the ballot on the basis that Trump had been involved in an “insurrection,” thereby violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

Rudy Giuliani, who is so low on cash he filed for bankruptcy, says that Donald Trump owes him about $2 million in unpaid legal fees for helping try to overturn the 2020 election.

Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in December, faced with insurmountable debt after he was found liable for defaming two Georgia state election workers. During a hearing on Wednesday, Giuliani told a Manhattan federal bankruptcy court that Trump had asked the former mayor to take over his campaign’s legal team in November 2020.

At the time, Trump’s lawyers and Trump-aligned lawyers were working to overturn the presidential election results. Courts across the country threw out every single one of the dozens of cases that Trump’s allies filed.

Giuliani said Wednesday that when he took over the Trump campaign’s legal staff, “it was my understanding that I would be paid by the campaign for my legal work and my expenses to be paid.”

“When we submitted the invoice for payment, they just paid the expenses. Not all but most. They never paid the legal fees,” Giuliani said. He added that he never calculated how much Trump still owes him, but he estimated it was about $2 million.

Giuliani was hurting financially even before the defamation ruling against him. He listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July and began representing himself in court to save on legal fees. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump to pay his legal fees. That didn’t work, but Trump did host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani in September. Entry cost $100,000 a plate.

When Giuliani declared bankruptcy in December, the filing showed that Giuliani owes as much as $500 million in debt but has only up to $10 million in assets. His biggest debt is to Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Giuliani owes the pair $148 million in damages for defaming them.

He owes money to Hunter Biden, electronic voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion, and an accounting firm. Giuliani is also in debt to his former associate Noelle Dunphy. Dunphy sued Giuliani in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead sexually harassing and abusing her over two years.

Ironically, the man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” owes money to multiple law firms for unpaid legal fees. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.

The lawyer representing Donald Trump at the Supreme Court on Thursday is no stranger to controversial legal battles: Jonathan Mitchell is one of the primary architects of Texas’s brutal anti-abortion law.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether Trump should appear on the Colorado primary ballot—and by extension, any other state’s ballot. Mitchell argued that the former president should not be disqualified.

But before Thursday’s arguments, Mitchell was best known for crafting Texas’s so-called vigilante law, which allows private citizens to sue someone they suspect got an abortion. The law, which was implemented in 2021, bans abortions after six weeks, before most people even know they’re pregnant.

Because it empowered private citizens, instead of state officials, to target people who got an abortion or people who helped someone get an abortion, the law could circumvent the regulations established by Roe v. Wade, which at the time had not yet been overturned. The state couldn’t punish someone for getting an abortion, but an individual could.

Mitchell has said he specializes in strategies for creating legislation that can “withstand a court challenge if one arises.”

One of his former law professors, Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago Law School, told NPR in 2023 that Mitchell is “a kind of a technical magician.”

The Texas law, of course, has had devastating effects on state residents. Women have been unable to get abortions, whether elective or medically necessary. Often, they have been forced to either wait until they suffer life-threatening complications from the pregnancy before they can get an abortion, or they have been forced to give birth to infants that die within hours of birth.

Mitchell told NPR that result “concerns” him because “the statute was never intended to restrict access to medically necessary abortions.” But the reality is that he helped create a culture of fear in Texas, with medical professionals too worried about legal repercussions to advise someone to get an abortion, let alone perform the procedure.

And Mitchell is looking to expand that atmosphere. Since Roe was overturned, he has argued for the enforcement of the Comstock Act, a nearly two-centuries-old anti-obscenity law. The measure bans, among other things, the transport of abortion-related materials across state lines. Mitchell, and many other conservative legal figures, believe the Comstock Act can be used to ban the sale of abortion medication.

Now Mitchell’s helping Trump, the man who helped overturn Roe, remain on the ballot.