U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is what many in the legal community would call an "absolute hack”: an appointee of former President Donald Trump who, since being randomly assigned the presumptive Republican nominee’s classified documents case last year, has done nothing to rebut the charge that she’s totally in the tank for the criminal defendant. Indulging every legal argument from the defense, Cannon has diligently ruled — or held off on ruling — in ways that ensure voters will not see a trial, much less a verdict, any time before November.
But there are bigger "hacks" in the federal judiciary, some of whom have opinions that Cannon and other district judges cannot simply ignore. A half-dozen right-wing activists now sit on the Supreme Court, half of them also picked by the only former president to have been impeached twice, found liable for rape and then convicted of 30-plus felonies. In their last ruling of the summer, after eviscerating the administrative state and opening the door to criminalizing homelessness, those justices declared Trump to be practically beyond the reaches of the law, deeming him ineligible for prosecution over any act that a defense attorney could argue was loosely related to his “official” duties.
