As President Biden frets that Trump may cause violence, assassination attempts on Trump and threats on Republican-appointed judges go unmentioned.
Even for someone who often can’t mumble two sentences together, President Biden was in rare form Friday (he was at work). As our James Lynch reports, the president fretted to the White House press corps that the 2024 election might not peaceful because of “very dangerous” things said by former president Trump. Having scoured a number of press reports and the White House website, I’ve seen no indication that Biden mentioned the two assassination attempts against Trump in the past few weeks of the campaign; hence, I can’t say whether he is similarly concerned about the Democrats’ “very dangerous” refrain that Trump is the worst threat to democracy in American history.
Also unmentioned by Biden is an apparent plot to kidnap and murder Judge Aileen Cannon.
Democrats and their media allies have been lambasting Cannon, a Trump appointee, since she was assigned to preside over the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and they have been apoplectic since July, when Cannon dismissed the indictment.
This past Thursday, Eric James Rennert was arrested based on a six-count indictment charging him with threatening to assault, kidnap, and murder a federal judge and that judge’s family in Florida’s St. Lucie County. The indictment does not name the judge. Nevertheless, as the New York Post reports, Cannon is the only judge who sits in the Fort Pierce courthouse in St. Lucie County.
Rennert, a 65-year-old Illinois man, appeared in Urbana, Ill., federal court, where a judge ordered him held without bail while he is transported to Florida for a detention hearing and other proceedings. According to the indictment, he allegedly made the threats “to retaliate against FEDERAL JUDGE 1 on account of the performance of official duties.” (Based on clerk’s office stamps on the copy of the indictment I’ve seen, I believe a federal grand jury in Florida returned it on September 25; I assume it was sealed until Rennert was arrested this week.)
As I’ve discussed (see, e.g., here and here), in July, Judge Cannon invalidated the indictment against Trump, which charged him with nearly three-dozen Espionage Act felonies for mishandling classified intelligence and with obstructing the underlying investigation. Cannon concluded that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel to oversee the case violated the Constitution’s appointments clause because Smith was neither (a) appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, nor (b) appointed under a congressional statute. (He was appointed under a DOJ regulation and the statutes cited by Garland do not empower an attorney general to create a special counsel office.)
Cannon’s 93-page opinion is a scholarly piece of work, and the conclusion she drew is the same conclusion drawn in a concurring opinion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling relating to Smith’s prosecution of Trump in the 2020 election-interference case) and in briefs filed by a number of conservative legal scholars, including former Attorneys General Ed Meese and Michael Mukasey. Before dismissing the case, Cannon asked the Justice Department to pose alternative cures for the defect, and there was one ready to hand: Garland could have reassigned Smith to work under the direction of a Biden-appointed, Senate-confirmed district U.S. attorney – such as the one in South Florida, where the case was indicted. Garland and Smith preferred to deny that there was anything to cure; they are appealing Cannon’s ruling.
Led by progressive Democratic lawyers, the left waged a tireless campaign against Cannon, a Trump-appointee, smearing her for allegedly slow-walking Trump’s prosecution. Chief Judge William Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit rejected the “orchestrated campaign” to get Cannon removed from the case. In point of fact, the case was a slog because Smith overcharged it, necessitating extensive pretrial proceedings and potential appeals under the Classified Information Procedures Act. The case was also slowed by the fact that Smith, along with elected Democratic district attorneys Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis, indicted Trump is three other complex cases in other parts of the country (Washington, D.C., New York City, and Atlanta), creating scheduling nightmares in all of the cases.
Following the illegal leak in early May 2022 of a draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision (overruling Roe v. Wade, which manufactured a right to abortion), leftwing agitators held intimidating protests at the homes of Republican-appointed justices who were believed (correctly, it turned out) to be in the Dobbs majority. Although such gatherings are illegal under federal criminal law, the Biden-Harris Justice Department refused to make arrests; subsequently, on June 8, 2022, 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske was arrested and eventually charged with attempting to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump-appointee. Roske told police he was incensed over the leaked draft of the Dobbs decision.
I would expect Rennert to appear in court in the Southern District of Florida soon, perhaps in the coming week.