'Deeply offensive': Trump biographer slams new Cannon ruling

As the Republican National Convention opened on Monday, Donald Trump scored a major legal victory when a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida dismissed the criminal case against the former president for illegally keeping classified national security documents after his presidency ended. Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Attorney General Merrick Garland had no power to appoint Jack Smith as a special counsel. Her ruling stunned many legal experts, and the Justice Department plans to appeal. This comes after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court recently granted Trump, and presidents more generally, almost complete immunity from prosecution for “official” actions taken in office. “This was an opinion in search of a result,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades. “This is just deeply offensive, and I suspect it will be overturned, but the real result is there is no prospect that Donald Trump will be tried before the November elections.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” We’re “Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman, broadcasting from Milwaukee.

As the Republican National Convention opened Monday, Donald Trump scored a major legal victory when a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida dismissed a criminal case against the former president for illegally keeping classified national security materials and documents, after his presidency ended, in Mar-a-Lago. Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Attorney General Merrick Garland had no power to appoint Jack Smith as a special counsel. Her ruling stunned many legal experts. The Justice Department plans to appeal the ruling.

This all comes after the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for “official” actions taken as president. Donald Trump reacted to the news Monday by calling for all criminal cases against him to be dismissed.

We’re joined now by David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, the author of three books on Trump, including The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. He’s a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. He’s speaking to us from Rochester.

David Cay Johnston, welcome back to Democracy Now! First, if you can respond to the scene last night here in Milwaukee at the Republican convention as President Trump, with a bandage on his right ear after surviving an assassination attempt on Saturday at his speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, sitting next to J.D. Vance, the youngest vice-presidential candidate, former marine, author of Hillbilly Elegy, just a first-time senator — if you can respond to that picture? And then talk about the significance of these court decisions.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, Donald Trump has picked just one of the many Republicans who were against him on principled grounds — he’s unfit, he’s unqualified, he doesn’t know anything, he’s a con artist, he’s a criminal, he’s a judicially determined rapist — and now embrace him, because they don’t have any interest here except their own careers. And given that more than a million people have died for this country and the idea of America, being unwilling to stand up on principle should offend every single American, whether you support Donald Trump or not.

Now, the ruling by Judge Cannon will not stand, in all likelihood. It will be appealed to the 11th Circuit. And what Judge Cannon did was say that under the Constitution, the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, should have gone before the U.S. Senate to be confirmed, the way federal court judges are confirmed by the Senate. The problem is, there are at least five statutes that authorize the appointment of what’s known in the Constitution as an inferior officer, and that covers special prosecutors. If you follow the very faulty reasoning in Judge Cannon’s opinion, then the prosecution of Hunter Biden would also have to stop, since that was done by a special prosecutor without confirmation by the Senate.

This was an opinion in search of a result. And Judge Cannon, from her very first order, when she said Donald Trump should get special treatment — an absolutely offensive thing to say for any federal judge. No one in America under the law is to get special treatment. We are all to be treated equal, as Chief Justice Roberts wrote in an opinion two years ago. This is just deeply offensive, and I suspect it will be overturned, but the real result is there is no prospect that Donald Trump will be tried before the November elections. And if he isn’t tried before then and Donald Trump gets back to the White House, he will stop the prosecution.

AMY GOODMAN: Many people saw this case, the mishandling of the documents, bringing them to Mar-a-Lago — and again, this was — dealing with and holding onto these documents was after he was president — as the most clear-cut, open-and-shut case, David.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: It absolutely was the strongest and easiest-to-prove case. And other people who have taken a single page from a secure facility have been prosecuted. Here, we’re talking about boxes and boxes.

But, you know, there’s another point, Amy, that hardly gets mentioned in the mainstream news. The special prosecutor, in defending his actions, has repeatedly given hypotheticals. Imagine if a former president were to have shared our secrets in return for payment to somewhere? Those hypotheticals were not made up out of whole cloth. We know that Donald Trump gave away one of our most closely guarded secrets: how close our submarines could get to Russian submarines without being detected. We know that he held up and read from documents to a group of completely inappropriate people working on a book.

And the clear implication — and I wrote about this August of 2022 — is that Donald Trump has, no doubt, sold or tried to sell national security secrets, because Donald doesn’t know anything about global diplomacy. He doesn’t know anything about the world. He couldn’t tell you the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. He didn’t know why we have a memorial at Pearl Harbor for the USS Arizona from Pearl Harbor Day. But he knows value. And super-secret things he learned as president, documents he took improperly, illegally, those have a lot of value. And Donald knows value.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressmember, talked about Aileen Cannon as a, quote, “Future Supreme Court Justice,” David Cay Johnston.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, if Trump did that, we could all clearly say, you know, “You’re effectively offering a bribe in return for favorable treatment.” But Trump doesn’t need to do that. He appointed Aileen Cannon, who was marginally qualified — and I’m being polite. And Matt Gaetz and many other Republicans, as Mitt Romney, the Republican standard-bearer in 2012, said, don’t believe in democracy. I mean, that’s the real underlying threat.

Your previous guest, Arlie, talked very clearly about how Donald Trump is succeeding because he keeps saying at every rally, “We love you.” Donald, who I’ve known for 36 years, doesn’t love anybody. He doesn’t even love himself. But he knows how to appeal to people who feel looked down upon. And that’s the sense that they have.

So, Joe Biden lets Republicans take credit for the infrastructure projects they voted against. And you know what surveys show? Lots of people believe all of this economic improvement was because of laws Trump got passed. They aren’t. They’re because of laws were passed at the direction of Joe Biden. But he’s not out there selling that. The Democrats aren’t there selling it. Instead, they’ve been engaging for two weeks in a circular firing squad, whose only beneficiary is Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, as you talk about J.D. Vance, tell us your reaction to him being the pick as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, what he represents, this man who himself described himself as a Never Trumper, who said, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a—hole” — though he used the word — “like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” He went on to say things like — talking about the vilifying of people in this country, etc.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: You know, Margaret Atwood’s nightmare novel The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, but it is moving towards reality in America. J.D. Vance wants to allow the tracking of women’s menstrual cycles. He asserts that daylight savings time is reducing fertility among the American population, which is as crazy as any crazy thing Donald Trump has said. He supports the Project 2025, which, among other things, would prohibit shipping contraceptives, whether it’s condoms or IUDs or the pill, by what’s called common carrier. That is, you could only ship if you had your own fleet of trucks that would go from manufacturing plant to store.

This is not a party promoting freedom. This is a party that wants to round up millions of people living in this country. And if you think only people who are here without permission would be rounded up, and no American citizens or green card holders, you haven’t thought this through very carefully. He wants to take away people’s ability to challenge things in the courts. He is anti-worker in numerous ways. And that’s what made, by the way, the speech by the Teamsters union president extraordinary, because everything he talked about is what the Biden administration is working to do and that Donald Trump opposes. Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, they are anti-worker. They’re anti-individual liberty. They’re in favor of controlling women, right down to tracking the menstrual cycles of younger women — which is none of the government’s business.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston, we want to thank you for being with us. We’ve expanded to two hours our daily broadcast. And in our other hour, people will hear specifically J.D. Vance’s views on abortion and also the whole labor record of Donald Trump, as we look at, with Robert Kuttner, the significance of Sean O’Brien’s first Teamsters president address to the RNC. David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, has written three books on Donald Trump.