Downside of Cannon Ruling for Trump: The Era of Good Will Was Short-Lived

I so appreciate Phil’s post. I also suggest readers hurry over to Dan’s post to grasp the significance of Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling today. I’ve been in the middle of a series on the Florida prosecution of former president Trump, so I’ll have my say — if there’s anything more to say — when that continues.

Net-net, Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the Florida documents case is a huge victory for Trump. It’s also a missed opportunity for Biden. I argue in a column we posted this morning that the president ought to dismiss the federal cases against Trump and urge the states to dismiss their cases against Trump — in order to demonstrate that he actually means what he said in Sunday’s Oval Office address.

I still think Biden should do that, especially given that the Justice Department will surely appeal Cannon’s decision. (The same constitutional issue regarding Smith’s status is implicated in the Washington case before Judge Tanya Chutkan.) Biden says he wants to try to heal our divisions. He surely needs to exhibit magnanimity and demonstrate discernment (given that the near-82-year-old POTUS’s capacity to function as president is in question). Nothing would better serve him along those lines than to dismiss the Biden DOJ’s Florida case against Trump.

Reminder: The Florida prosecution involves 32 felony Espionage Act charges (a combined potential 320 years’ imprisonment for the 78-year-old former president) that Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland have lodged. That, despite the fact that Garland and another special counsel he supervises, Robert Hur, decided to bring zero charges against Biden, who committed the same statutory offense — illegal retention of national-defense intelligence. Indeed, Biden’s lawlessness in this regard stretched back decades. Hur found that there was more than enough evidence to prosecute but suggested exercising discretion against indicting Biden because of his senescence.

By ordering that the Florida case be dismissed, or by pardoning Trump, Biden would show the voting public that he understands the scandal of two-tiered justice, and that he is taking meaningful steps to address it — after three years of being the principal culprit.

Nevertheless, Cannon’s ruling calls for making a political point, rather than a legal one.

Since nearly being killed Saturday, former president Trump is riding a tide of good will. His heroic performance while literally under fire at the podium in Pennsylvania moved even his detractors. As a result, Trump critics — other than the fringe Left — have been muted. Democrats seem to grasp the gravity of an attempted murder of a presidential candidate (shades of the 1968 assassination that killed Bobby Kennedy). Almost uniformly, they have expressed good wishes for the former president and his family. This has allowed Trump to go into the start of the GOP convention in Milwaukee in higher political regard than he has ever known.

Judge Cannon’s ruling, particularly the timing of it, is going to short-circuit that era of good feeling. It gives Democrats and their media allies the opening to go on offense against Trump again. Using Cannon’s appointment by Trump to smear her ruling as corrupt, they are already talking again about the former president’s irresponsible handling of top-secret intelligence and his obstruction of a grand-jury investigation.

To the extent Biden might have given consideration to improving his own standing by granting clemency to Trump, Cannon’s ruling makes that even more unlikely than it probably was. Throughout his presidency, Biden has never been able to face down the hard Left. Now, in the wake of Cannon’s ruling so soon after the assassin’s attack, the hard Left will recover its voice. As I contend in today’s aforementioned column, showing magnanimity to Trump and rejecting lawfare would enhance Biden’s standing with the voting public. It would give him a better chance to win reelection. But if past is prologue, Biden will shrink because the Left is shrieking.

Again, that doesn’t change the bottom line that Cannon’s ruling is a boon for Trump. But it also means that whatever grace period the former president might reasonably have hoped to get from his media-Democrat-complex adversaries is coming to an abrupt end.