“Almost pointless discussion”: Ex-Mueller prosecutor calls out Judge Aileen Cannon’s “snarky” order

Within minutes of each other, the judges overseeing the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump in Florida and Washington, D.C. made two starkly different decisions on how classified records in their respective proceedings will be handled, The Messenger reports. In a ruling on a motion from prosecutors asking to provide only summaries of specific classified records during discovery, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the D.C.-based election subversion case against the former president, agreed with special counsel Jack Smith. Chutkan decided that prosecutors in the case, in which Trump faces four felony counts, are “authorized to withhold from discovery the classified information specified in its motion, and to provide the unclassified summary substitution specified in its motion to the defense.”

Moments earlier, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon filed a separate order on another classified records matter in the South Florida case, where Trump is accused of willfully retaining national security records post-presidency at his Mar-a-Lago resort club and attempting to thwart government efforts to retrieve them. In her decision, Cannon found that arguments from Smith’s office “lack merit” and reaffirmed the protective orders regarding classified information that were previously in place in the case. “Judge Cannon’s decision goes straight for the capillaries,” Andrew Weissmann, a former assistant U.S. attorney wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Almost pointless discussion, when so many real issue are left undecided. And her language is far too snarky for a federal judge.”