Judge Cannon’s Two Scenarios ‘Direct Jury To Find Trump Not Guilty’—Lawyer

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case has given the jury routes to find the former president not guilty in a “perplexing” court order, an attorney has said.

Judge Aileen Cannon is overseeing the Republican nominees’ Mar-a-Lago indictment in which Trump was charged with retaining national security information—including U.S. nuclear secrets and plans for military retaliation in the event of an attack—and obstructing efforts to retrieve them in June 2023.

Prosecutors have said Trump took documents that he was no longer authorized to have after leaving the White House in January 2021 and that he resisted repeated requests by federal officials to return them. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the charges.

On Monday, Cannon issued an order instructing lawyers to file proposed jury instructions by April 2 in which she laid out two different legal scenarios, one which would instruct the jury to decide whether Trump did not have the authorization to keep classified documents found on his property, and the second assuming Trump had authority to keep the records because he was president, as per an understanding of the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

Trump’s legal team has filed a motion saying the act allowed him to retain the materials as his own personal property and Cannon is yet to rule on it.

Reacting to the order in her blog, Civil Discourse, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance criticized it, calling it “perplexing” and “crazy.”

She wrote: “Although the order is only two pages, it’s perplexing.

“It’s two page of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act.”

“I’ve never had a judge say, ‘you know, I have no idea what the law is here, so lets make a couple of different assumptions about it, and even though they’re both wrong, give me some ideas,'” she added.

“The assumptions in Judge Cannon’s two scenarios virtually direct the jury to find Trump not guilty, by suggesting that a president can hold onto any government property he wants to as long as he designates it as personal before he leaves office. The only questions she leaves open is whether anyone can second guess a former president who pinky promises he decided something was personal before he went back home. For instance, in the first one, she directs the lawyers to assume that juries get to examine each item a former president is charged with retaining and decide whether the government has proven that it is personal or presidential. So, it’s up to the jury to decide what’s personal and what isn’t.”

Newsweek contacted a representative for Trump by email to comment on this story.

Cannon has frequently been the subject of criticism for making a number of decisions that favored the former president, including ones that could potentially delay the start of the trial, scheduled for May.

Earlier this month, she accepted two amicus briefs filed by the America First Legal Foundation group and former President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese arguing that the case should be thrown out. Some commentators questioned this decision.

Meanwhile in February, Cannon was accused of bias towards Trump after she ordered federal prosecutors to hand over unredacted materials sought by the former president’s legal team in discovery, as well as the two other co-defendants in the case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.

Aside from Vance, attorney and Trump critic George Conway called the order “utterly nuts.”

While lawyer Bradley P. Moss called Cannon’s second scenario “legally insane.”

Cannon is due to confirm when the classified documents trial will start. She is expected to push it back from its current start date of May 20.