District Judge Mark Scarsi, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020, recently denied a motion to dismiss Hunter Biden’s criminal tax case, a move that legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said is telling Judge Aileen Cannon that she was “dead wrong” about the dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case in Florida earlier this summer.
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In a Tuesday episode of his YouTube show, Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and MSNBC legal analyst who frequently criticizes Trump, discussed how a Monday ruling in Hunter Biden’s criminal tax lawsuit, which denied the defense’s request to throw out the case, essentially called out Cannon’s mid-July decision to dismiss Trump’s classified documents case.
Prosecutors say President Joe Biden’s 54-year-old son failed to pay $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 to 2019. He faces three felony tax charges and six misdemeanors and has pleaded not guilty. Jury selection in Biden’s case is set to take place in Los Angeles, California, on September 5.
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In Biden’s legal team’s motion to dismiss the case, they specifically cited Cannon’s ruling in Trump’s case and the logic behind it, arguing that Special Counsel David Weiss was unlawfully appointed in Biden’s case. District Judge Scarsi denied the motion on Monday.
Kirschner described the ruling as “Trump-appointed Judge Scarsi refusing to apply the reasoning, the rational, the ruling of Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon when she concluded ‘yeah, I don’t think special counsel is a thing and I’m dismissing Donald Trump’s criminal case.'”
He added: “This ruling from Judge Scarsi, in a very real sense, is him concluding ‘Aileen Cannon you’re dead wrong.'”
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In a phone call with Newsweek, Kirschner said that while “a ruling by one federal trial court judge does not bind another federal trial court judge, judges will always look to what their colleagues are doing on the federal bench for guidance and insight, called persuasive authority.”
Newsweek reached out to Biden’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, for comment via email on Wednesday.
On July 15, Cannon dismissed Trump’s classified documents case on the basis that Special Counsel Jack Smith was not properly appointed. Trump was facing 40 federal charges in Cannon’s court over his alleged handling of sensitive materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after leaving the White House in January 2021. He was also accused of obstructing efforts by federal authorities to retrieve them. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Cannon wrote that the appointment of Smith and the funding of his office were unconstitutional.
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Kirschner noted to Newsweek that Scarsi’s ruling, which contrasts Cannon’s interpretation of the special counsel, highlights a “split” within the federal courts on this issue. This division, according to Kirschner, increases the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually take up Trump’s classified documents case if it advances through the appeals process.
“You can’t have all these federal court judges resolving cases in different ways,” Kirschner said, adding that at some point there has to be definitive ruling on the issue. He noted that special counsels or special prosecutors have “always been attacked,” largely because of the nature of their “high-stakes litigation.”
