Author’s Note: This is the second of a two-column series on this week’s controversy over the Florida federal prosecution of former president Donald Trump, which featured a sharp exchange between special counsel Jack Smith and Judge Aileen Cannon.
In part one of this two-column series, we covered the sharp exchange between Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith and Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon over Trump’s main defense in the Mar-a-Lago documents case — his claim that what prosecutors charge as 32 felony counts of unlawful retention of national-defense intelligence is excused by the Presidential Records Act (PRA). In a nutshell, Trump seeks to posit that (a) he must be deemed to have designated the documents as his personal records under the PRA (even though he has not explained when or how he did that), and (b) no court or jury has legal authority to second-guess this designation that — unbeknownst to his White House staff — he supposedly made as president.
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