Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Judge Cannon RESURFACES in NEW CASE out of NOWHERE
Episode Date: October 1, 2024We have a cosmic collision involving Trump: on the same day Trump and Vance had criminal charges sworn out against them by the proud Ohio Haitian community for hate speech crimes, the criminal case ag...ainst his would-be assassin is being prosecuted by the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida—a member of the Haitian American community—and has been “randomly” assigned to Judge Cannon. Michael Popok who practices in these Florida courts and knows the players explains it all on his latest hot take. Thanks to HexClad! Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/LEGALAF! #hexcladpartner Join the Legal AF Patreon: https://Patreon.com/LegalAF Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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This is Michael Popak, Legal AF.
We're watching a cosmic collision of events surrounding Donald Trump,
where we have on one side,
Judge Cannon has been assigned to the criminal prosecution of the would-be
assassin of Donald Trump, Ryan Wesley Roth,
the guy with the gun at the golf course.
I'll talk about how Cannon got the case, but on the other side,
prosecuting the case,
seeking justice for both Trump and America is a about how Cannon got the case. But on the other side, prosecuting the case, seeking
justice for both Trump and America is a proud Haitian American, the US attorney for the
Southern District of Florida, who's going to be prosecuting this case. His name is Markenzie
LaPointe. Markenzie LaPointe came to this country when he was 16. He became a naturalized citizen in 1995.
Take that, JD Vance.
His mother worked odd jobs in restaurants.
He was a proud Marine.
He worked his way up by his bootstraps,
living in a relatively poor,
Haitian dominated community in Miami called Liberty City.
He got out of that environment.
He became a proud attorney,
clerked for the Florida Supreme Court,
worked for some major law firms in Miami,
national law firms indeed.
As a partner, Joe Biden picked him as the US attorney
and he was confirmed by the Senate.
And now Markenzie LaPointe,
a proud member of the Haitian American legal and business
community in Miami, one that I proudly call friends, having worked in Miami for 20 years,
having many, many friends who are Haitian Americans and contribute to our society and
always have, who helped bring to Ohio, to Springfield, Ohio, through an underground railroad, connecting people beleaguered from Haiti, the island,
and connecting them to jobs that were necessary
to be filled in Springfield, Ohio.
That's why, to answer the question,
why are Haitians in Ohio under temporary protective status?
To work.
A welcome mat was placed by the Ohio
and Springfield business community
and Chamber of Commerce to fill 15,000 jobs,
jobs that they couldn't fill in factories
of theirs after COVID.
And that this was supposed to be a beautiful story
about how Haitians seeking to breathe free
came to this country to work in Ohio,
but not in the hands of JD Vance and Donald Trump.
So what do we have?
Almost on the same day that Donald Trump and JD Vance get charged with sworn out charges
for criminal counts in Ohio for their hate speech directed at the Haitian community there,
the proud Haitian community.
You have the case being assigned for the would-be assassin to Aileen Cannon and being prosecuted by a
Haitian American. Very proud indeed. I'm gonna pull it all together in this hot
take because I'm a proud member of the Southern District of Florida myself.
I practiced in Florida for 20 years. Let me break it all down for you. First, how did
this case get to Judge Cannon? Let's talk about that.
There are 17 judges in the Southern District of Florida.
It runs from the top at Fort Pierce
to the bottom at Key West,
which stops along the way in Fort Pierce, West Palm Beach,
Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Key West.
And there are judges assigned to each of them.
Of the 17 judges, nine sit in Miami,
including the Chief Judge Judge Altenaga.
Four sit in Fort Lauderdale, and the rest, three of them,
Judge Robin Rosenberg, Judge Don Middlebrooks,
Judge Aileen Cannon, sit in West Palm Beach
or in Fort Pierce.
The rest of the judges assigned to the Southern District,
there are 11 of them, are senior status,
and they don't take regular caseloads. They take a half a caseload or a quarter of a caseload. It just depends.
Now, when you file your prosecution in this case, the indictment got returned by a, I presume,
a West Palm Beach grand jury because where the attempted shooting happened near Mar-a-Lago is in Palm Beach County, Florida,
which puts it in the West Palm Beach Division of the Southern District of Florida Federal Court.
There is a wheel. We joked internally, does the wheel have a magnet? How does it keep landing
on alien cannon? But Angela Noble is the clerk of the Southern District of Florida and she ran the
wheel electronically and it got assigned to Aileen Cannon. There's only three judges it
could have been assigned to. Don Middlebrooks, who's moving towards senior status, Robin Rosenberg,
or Aileen Cannon. And so there was a one in three chance that it would be assigned to them.
Probably one in two if Don Middlebrooks
is not taking a full docket.
And so it's 50-50.
I mean, I'm sure it's not something,
I'm sure the Department of Justice
and the US Attorney's Office in Florida
smacked their forehead when it got assigned.
I will have to see how she treats this defendant
compared to how she's been bending over backwards
to help Donald Trump in her courtroom. I doubt she's been bending over backwards to help Donald Trump in her courtroom,
I doubt she's gonna bend over backwards
to help Ryan Wesley Ruth.
Ryan Wesley Ruth or Roth, his family is so disgusting
that on Tuesday, his son, Orrin,
got indicted and arraigned on child pornography
because they found hundreds of disgusting,
filthy, obscene photos, child pornography photos on his Galaxy tablet when they
were executing a search warrant in North Carolina related to his father.
And they already, he's already been arraigned on child pornography charges
that they found in executing that search warrant.
So, so, you know, a disgusting family.
Um, yes, presumed innocent, but let's move on.
So the wheel spins and now we've got the five felony counts
starting with attempted assassination
of a major presidential candidate,
which as you would expect is a felony under 18 USC
section 351 little C and other things related to that.
If he's convicted of this, he will go away for
the rest of his natural born days. That is for sure. He's also a felon apparently. He already had
a felony, a rap, and he's possessed the firearm, which he's not allowed to do. Of course, we already
found the notes that'll be used in evidence against him in which he said
that his goal was to kill former President Trump. So he's got, he'd also apparently during the
struggle assaulted a police officer and that's count three, assaulting a federal officer. I'm
sure that's during his apprehension and when they shot at him. Now, I think what we're going to watch
just as a viewer guide is Judge Cannon doing this
one by the book.
I don't think she's going to interfere with the magistrate.
I think she's going to do the arraignment.
In fact, the arraignment technically should be in front of magistrate Judge McCabe who's
been assigned to the case.
If you want to just see here, we'll put it up on the screen.
You see Cannon, McCabe.
McCabe means the magistrate.
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Generally, the magistrate judges in federal court
handle arraignments.
They handle discovery exchange
and documents being provided to the defense.
They handle all of that first appearance stuff.
You get to the judge later on.
Now, Cannon decided to jump into the middle of Trump
and do and push her assigned magistrate judge aside.
And in fact, this is a new magistrate judge
that's been assigned to her for this particular case.
So we'll have to see first what she ends up letting the magistrate judge do in the normal course
or whether she tries to take it for herself. If she takes it for herself, I am sure
she's not going to be doing what she did against Donald Trump where she put her big fat finger
or thumb on the scale of justice in favor of the defendant bent over backwards and drove the Department of Justice crazy.
Now the Department of Justice is not technically the lead prosecutor here. A division of the Department of Justice, which is the Southern District of Florida
Attorney's office is. So you've got Markenzie LaPointe,
Southern District of Florida signing the indictment, Mark Dispoto,
Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida signing the indictment, Mark Despoto, Assistant US Attorney
for the Southern District,
AJ Alexander, same, Abby Waxman, same,
and then you have one lawyer from Maine Justice,
which is the Department of Justice in Washington.
So you have David Smith, a trial attorney,
National Security Division, counterterrorism section.
So they got all the right people there.
They got all the right people there. But when they checked the box on the certificate, on the civil cover sheet, which
they had to, they had to check, you either check Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Key West, or WPB, which is
West Palm Beach. They had to check West Palm Beach, which again put us into the one in three chance,
one in two chance, depending upon Don Middlebrook's
docket these days, for her to get this.
Now the magistrate, as I said, is going to be Judge McCabe, and we're going to have to
watch to see how much of this case is going to be handled by Aileen Cannon?
Now, I speculated that maybe Aileen Cannon got another phone call from Chief Judge Alton
Aga suggesting that it's not a good look optically and it gives people a bad feeling
about her being fair and impartial if she handles the case.
We know from prior reporting that Judge Altonaga and probably Dom Middlebrooks called
Alien Cannon and tried to convince her to step down from the Trump case early on after she had
been reversed twice by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for her prior misconduct in the case,
but she refused and stayed in the case. My gut is another phone caller and treaty to this Federalist Society, somebody's in the Federalist Society
pocket is not going to work. I've already done prior reporting about Aileen Cannon taking frequent
gifts and trips from the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo and having things arranged by Donald
Trump's own in-house White House counsel for her benefit at a time she knew or should have known that the case was coming up to her for an indictment. So there's judgment issues, an impairment of judgment issues
around Aileen Cannon. Now let me talk about this split-screen optic of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance
being indicted in Ohio under a sworn affidavit filed by a Haitian not-for-profit group about
their attacks on the Haitian community legally here under temporary protective
status and what happens next there versus the Haitian American who came
here when he was 16 years old and was naturalized in 1995 just the way we want
that to happen under a humane and dignified immigration policy
about Markenzie LaPointe being the US attorney in the Southern District of Florida and signing
the indictment to indict and bring to justice the person who wanted to kill Donald Trump.
Think about that split screen for a minute. In Ohio, there's a quirky little law that
allows private citizens to swear out an affidavit and claim that somebody
else in the state has committed a crime or somewhere else has committed a crime against them.
That affidavit gets filed to municipal court. The municipal court judge then decides if it
has properly stated a case under the Ohio law for the charges that are listed. It then gets turned
over to the prosecutor's office
who then looking at it, reviewing it
after a hearing in court in which the citizens
get to advocate their position,
he then or she then makes the decision
whether to prosecute the case.
So there's a multi-step process,
but it starts with the filing of a sworn affidavit,
swearing out charges, criminal charges
against Donald Trump and JD Vance,
and we have that already.
And then you've got the beautiful poignant story
of Mckenzie LaPointe, who I've talked about prior hot ticks,
having been down in Florida for 20 years,
practicing there and practicing
in the Southern District of Florida,
knowing the judges reasonably well.
And I don't know Morkenzie directly,
but I have close friends that are close with him.
I call the Haitian American community in Miami,
proudly my friend.
I've been to many of their galas
for the Haitian Bar Association
and have stuck up for them in a number of hot takes
here on the Midas Touch Network.
What's going to happen next is the arraignment happens. We'll see what happens with the
magistrate and then we'll see. We'll watch carefully the split screen again of Judge
Cannon, how she handles this case versus how she's handled the case of dismissing the indictment
against Donald Trump because she found the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to be a figment of our imagination,
to be improperly appointed,
improperly funded under the Constitution.
We'll follow it all right here on the Midas Touch Network.
And on Legal AF, I got great news.
We got a new YouTube channel
in collaboration with the Midas Touch Network.
I'll be curating and the executive producer
for called Legal AFMTN.
Go to YouTube at Legal AFMTN.
I'll be curating the top stories
at the intersection of law and politics,
sometimes all law, sometimes all politics,
commentary and analysis you've come to love and expect
from the Midas Touch Network now at Legal AFMTN.
Still the podcast Legal AF on Wednesdays and Saturdays
at 8 p.m. Eastern time on this Midas Touch YouTube
channel and along with hot takes of my content like this right here, but this new channel,
a new opportunity to speak to you on a daily basis with new custom videos, exclusive videos.
You can only find it Legal AF MTN. Find out what 40 million people a month already know. That Legal AF is the home of law and politics,
commentary and analysis like no other
in the YouTube universe.
And I invite you to join us.
So until my next hot take, until my next Legal AF,
until my next exclusive content for Legal AF MTN on YouTube,
this is Michael Popak reporting.
In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network,
we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. on YouTube, this is Michael Popak reporting.