JUDGE NAUGHT

Disgraced former President Donald Trump is having a rough week in Manhattan court. He’s doing much better at subverting justice elsewhere.

• Trump lurched into the 2024 presidential campaign facing four felony cases over a mind-boggling range of alleged criminal activity. In response, he fired up his favorite tried-and-trusty legal strategy: delay. This week, it became clear that Trump’s big plan to throw sand in the gears of justice has worked all-too-well everywhere except in New York, aided by a mixture of corrupt or aligned jurists, including several he put on the bench himself.

• On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (whom Trump appointed just days before the end of his presidency) delayed indefinitely Trump’s Florida case over charges of mishandling military secrets. Cannon’s excuse was that a trial just isn’t possible now given that her docket is so packed with complicated motions and issues to sort out. The truth is that Cannon engineered this backlog, and thus engineered the delay. She insisted on hearings for motions that other judges would process routinely; she created delay and controversy on questions that nobody raised; she ruled and then reversed herself, eating up precious time, after Special Counsel Jack Smith threatened to appeal her errors to the 11th Circuit. Cannon had only tried two criminal cases in her entire career before this case. She had never tried one involving highly classified documents. The delay she manufactured for Trump is the result of incompetence, or corruption, or both.

• Meanwhile, the Georgia Supreme Court agreed today to hear Trump’s appeal, creating a new delay in Trump’s Atlanta racketeering case. Trump is still trying to get Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis kicked off this massive election conspiracy case over allegations that her personal relationship with former prosecutor Nathan Wade was improper. In Georgia, Trump is charged as the head of a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2024 election. This trial was unlikely to happen before election day. Today’s announcement makes it all but impossible. That leaves Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case, which is currently stalled while the Supreme Court weighs Trump’s immunity claims. There’s a chance the Justices could rule quickly and in a way that gets the trial back on track. But most experts think that’s unlikely.  

These delays put the question of Trump’s accountability directly in the hands of voters. If he can’t scramble back into the White House, he’ll stand trial, eventually, like anyone else.

NEWS NEWS NEWS 

President Biden told CNN the U.S. will stop sending weapons to Israel if the country launches a major assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah. He also acknowledged that American weapons have been used to kill civilians.

The U.S. withheld a large arms shipment to Israel last week to signal concerns over a possible Rafah invasion, senior administration officials told NBC News. The Biden Administration also missed a deadline today for releasing a report on whether Israel is using U.S.-sourced arms in accordance with international law. State Department Spokesperson Matt Miller said the legally-required report to Congress should be completed by tomorrow.

Independent presidential candidate RFK Jr.’s campaign confirmed that a parasitic worm once got into his head, ate part of his brain and died there, resulting in memory loss and fogginess. The campaign, which has presented the 70-year-old Kennedy family scion as the younger and more-vigorous alternative to Biden or Trump, insists he’s feeling fine now. And yet… we have so many questions.

Amazon turned off the torrent of negative online reviews for South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s book, the notorious tome in which Noem boasts about shooting her dog and tells a bogus story about staring down North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. But don’t worry, you can still write reviews on Noem’s forthcoming follow-up book, “Saving America from Wokeness Through Dog Murder.”

Meanwhile, Noem, whose book is called “No Going Back,” may finally be backing down from days of insisting that shooting the family dog is simply what strong leaders do. She ditched a planned appearance with Fox’s Greg Guttfeld on Tuesday night. Man, you know it’s bad when you’re a Republican afraid that *Fox News* will ask you the tough questions.

Marge did it! Rep. After days of talks seeking concessions from Speaker Mike Johnson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) surprised everyone by triggering her long-threatened motion to oust Johnson from the chair. Republicans quickly moved to kill the motion, but eleven of them voted against Johnson, which means there would have been enough votes to oust YET ANOTHER GOP speaker had Democrats not come to Johnson’s rescue.

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