No. of Recommendations: 17
The calculus involved here is extremely complex.
The prosecutor could withdraw the charges for now, let some time elapse, then attempt to re-file them. This poses several risks.
In theory, the charges still need to be filed in the district court serving the place where the crimes were committed which would still involve this district court which COULD mean that Cannon could still be randomly assigned the case... A SECOND TIME.
Given how the judicial process has been perverted to date, it is possible that district court could invent somem precedent that requires a case already subjected to litigation by Judge X in one round should be assigned back to that Judge X if charges are re-filed in another round to avoid "wasting time" with another judge coming up to speed.
There's more than a zero percent chance that dropping the charges, waiting some period of time, then re-filing charges could be viewed negatively by potential trial jurors, lowering the chance of a guilty verdict being rendered in a case in which a guilty verdict would normally be a no-brainer.
There is one other more existential risk to this case at the moment that prosecutors have to consider which has been discussed here before. At any point while current charges are pending, Cannon could invent some legal theory or rule from the bench about some aspect of the case and completely toss the charges WITH PREJUDICE. If she does that, the acts cited in the indictment become unusable in ANY future attempt at prosecution. That doesn't mean that if Cannon acts in such a way deemed to be entirely outside any justification of the law or trial procedure precedents that SHE cannot be held accountable via impeachment, etc. However, such a decision IN THIS CASE would be irreversable. Our system is so tilted towards the rights of a defendant that there are certain events that have no Ctrl-Z button when they favor the defendant. Having charges thrown out with prejudice by a judge hearing the case is one of those events.
As stated previously, I think this is why Jack Smith has not used information about the documents Trump shared in his office at his Bedminster golf club in this Florida case. If worse comes to worse, he has that single crime which clearly occured in another court district that is equally injurious to national security to prosecute if the Florida case is derailed.
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As it stands, Cannon is already light-years away from any bounds of normal jurisprudence in this case, with this hearing regarding claims that prosectors essentially "destroyed evidence" by not preserving the exact order and position of the documents retained illegally by the defendant. The nature of the national security document laws that were violated had nothing to do with keeping the documents "in order", by page number, by topic, by author or by whatever scheme Trump chose to use when taking them in the first place and storing them illegally. MERE POSESSION of the documents is the crime. The CONTINUED RETENTION of the same documents AFTER the National Archives REQUESTED their return is the crime. INTENTIONALLY misleading federal agents PRIOR to a search warrant and CONTINUING to mislead federal agents AFTER a search warrant about the location of all requested documents is the crime.
The argument posed by Trump's attorneys not only should have been rejected with a single word from the bench -- DENIED -- in ten seconds by Cannon, it should have resulted in fines to the lawyers for filing such a frivolous motion. Instead, the motion triggered multiple days of delay for a hearing to be held, burned nearly four hours of court time for the arguments to be made and STILL hasn't resulted in Cannon announcing a decision. All of which fits her modus operandi of leveraging the substitition of motion for progress as she "plays judge" by holding hearings on things having no legal merit as a means of delaying what should have been an open and shut case with virtually zero legal issues to resolve.
WTH
