A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Trump Being Tried For Violating The Espionage Act

Enter Judge Aileen Cannon. Judge Cannon has turned what many legal experts (including myself) have called  the “…strongest, most cut-and-dried case out there…” into a legal travesty. Cannon has delayed the case repeatedly including, refusing to set a trial date, the unheard of allowing outside parties to present oral arguments as opposed to usual amicus briefs, and overall entertaining defense arguments that other judges would have dismissed without hearings, among other legal head-scratchers.

As an outsider looking at what has transpired in the Trump Espionage Act indictment, I have to wonder if Judge Cannon ever wanted to try the case. Her decision today to dismiss the case amid her concerns about the legality of the appointment of a special counsel who filed the charges against Mr. Trump, a practice that has been upheld by court decision after court decision, confirms my suspicion. As an attorney, and one who has been tried under the Espionage Act, my disgust is only “trumped” by a lack of surprise.

Judge Aileen Cannon was appointed by the Trump Administration in 2020. Cannon also once received a luxury trip (that she failed to report until it was discovered) to Montana to attend the Sage Lodge Colloquium which can only be described as an indoctrination seminar for right-wing judges funded by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, and organized by the George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. To speculate that Judge Cannon may have had a bias towards Mr. Trump going into the classified documents case would be justified. With today’s decision any such speculation was made fact.

What is particularly fascinating about today’s decision is that the end result has essentially been Judge Cannon treating the Espionage Act in the same way prosecutors and the government treat whistleblowers in Espionage Act cases. In the Espionage Act prosecutions against whistleblowers, including Julian Assange, the government has engaged in a calculated obfuscation by laying focus away from the real issue at hand (the illegality of the government), and instead set their sites  on the whistleblower. Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, John Kiriakou and myself, among others, have been subjected to character assassination in order to change the focus to something more suitable to the prosecuting government whose wrongdoings have been exposed.

Judge Cannon has done the exact same thing. Instead of addressing the facts and issues at hand, she placed her focus on issues of negligible relevance all the while ignoring the overall, real issues and facts of the case against Mr. Trump. What better way to avoid or kill an issue than by refusing to look at it? I wonder how many times Judge Cannon has seen “The Wizard of Oz” because she is definitely imploring us and the law to, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

Judge Cannon has been called inexperienced and even in over her head, as evidenced by her handling of the case against Mr. Trump. I disagree. I think Judge Cannon knows exactly what she is and has been doing. This is not an instance of a good judge making her best judgements based on the law. No, Judge Cannon is a political appointee interpreting, if not butchering the law per an agenda.

I make no allusion that Judge Cannon’s approach to the Espionage Act is the way it should be done. Her approach to indictments based on that antiquated law favors only one person, Donald Trump. No whistleblower facing Espionage Act charges has so benefitted. I find the comments about this travesty from Elie Mystal, The Nation‘s Justice correspondent, quite sage: “The thing about picking your own judge: it works.”

Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA case officer who was at the Agency, including the Iran Task Force, for nearly a decade. He filed an employment discrimination suit against the CIA, but the case was dismissed as a threat to national security. He served two and a half years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act. No incriminating evidence was produced at trial and Sterling continues to profess his innocence. His memoir, “Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower” was published in late 2019. He serves as a Whistleblower Advocate with RootsAction.