How Jack Smith fired a 'quiet shot' at Trump-appointed judge in Mar-a-Lago docs case

Special counsel Jack Smith and former President Donald Trump both have disagreements with judges they have been dealing with in court cases, but how they respond to them is radically different.

Trump angrily rails against judges, prosecutors, witnesses and plaintiffs; Smith, in contrast, is polite when he disagrees with Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee assigned to the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

The Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery describes one of Smith's disagreements with Cannon in an article published on February 12.

READ MORE:Aileen Cannon pauses unredacted document deadline after Smith warns of 'clear error'

"Faced with a federal judge in the Donald Trump Mar-a-Lago classified documents case who keeps making bizarre rulings clearly favoring the man who appointed her, federal prosecutors have resorted to citing case law that Aileen Cannon should know for one major reason: She worked on it herself," Pagliery explains. "Department of Justice special prosecutor Jack Smith fired off a quiet shot across the bow at Cannon in a recent court filing — a filing that seeks to block Trump's latest ploy to morph this criminal case into some kind of wild goose chase against the Biden Administration."

Trump's legal team, Pagliery notes, has been trying to show "political bias" by asking "Cannon to force the DOJ to turn over all kinds of documents" — which the reporter describes as "a fishing expedition to delay the trial." And Smith is pointing out that "Cannon herself worked on a case that established some clear restrictions on this kind of legal deep-sea voyage."

"Back when she was a federal prosecutor in South Florida," Pagliery reports, "Cannon worked on a case involving a 2015 sting operation that caught two men who planned to rob a fake stash house of half a million dollars of cocaine, showing up with two AK-47s in their pickup truck. One of them appealed his conviction by claiming he was subject to an unfair 'selective prosecution' on the grounds that the vast majority of stash house stings nab Blacks and Hispanics…. Now that Trump is making a similarly spectacular claim, Smith's prosecutors have reminded Judge Cannon that her hard-won victory is the very reason she should rule against the former president."

Pagliery adds, "Defendants can't just demand a government document dump by pointing to some flimsy notion of 'selective prosecution,' the DOJ argued."

READ MORE: Judge Aileen Cannon called out for wasting time on Trump’s 'frivolous' pleadings

Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).