Jack Smith Gets a Bit of What He Wanted

In the 10 months that she has overseen Donald Trump’s classified documents case, Judge Aileen Cannon has issued a raft of curious decisions and entertained claims from the defense that many federal judges would have rejected out of hand. She’s also allowed a pileup of unresolved legal issues to grow so thick that it’s threatening to delay any trial from taking place until after the election in November.

This week, the special counsel Jack Smith signaled he’d had enough.

In an unusual display of frustration, Smith wrote in a court filing on Tuesday night that one of Cannon’s recent orders wasn’t merely slowing down the case, but was based on “a fundamentally flawed legal premise” — not the sort of thing you typically hear a prosecutor saying to a judge.

Smith laid out his own solution to the problem he believed that Cannon had created: The judge, he said, should issue a ruling on one of Trump’s most brazen defenses in the case, and she should do so quickly, affording prosecutors the chance to appeal if she decides against them.

Today, Cannon gave Smith a bit of what he had asked for — but not everything.

She issued a ruling, just like he’d requested, rejecting Trump’s attempt to escape prosecution by arguing that he had converted the highly sensitive records he took from the White House into his own personal property. But she didn’t kill the argument altogether, suggesting that she might allow something similar to be raised in front of the jury during trial.

The dispute, while specific to the classified documents prosecution, points to the broader ways in which Trump’s lawyers have managed to gum up his criminal cases, including those in Washington and Georgia based on similar charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election.

His legal team has repeatedly thrown sand into the gears of the proceedings, grinding them to all but a halt with endless waves of motions, many of them bordering on frivolous.