Aileen Cannon Is Back In A Bad Sequel To Her Trump Debut

A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.

Investigating Investigators: Aileen Cannon Edition

An incisive new report from Charlie Savage on the sprawling sham investigation underway in South Florida puts U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon back in the thick of things.

What has emerged in recent weeks is that Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones is overseeing a criminal investigation dating back to the 2016 election. He reportedly subpoenas investigators into Trump-Russia ties in 2016, including former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

What’s new at Savage:

• Reding Quiñones impaneled a “supplemental” grand jury in Ft. Pierce, Florida, where only Judge Cannon of the Mar-a-Lago case can oversee it. “He did not explain why he was impaneling an additional grand jury 130 miles away in Judge Cannon’s courthouse,” Savage reports.
• Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche oversaw Reding Quiñones’ investigation into investigators through a junior official in the DAG’s office named Christopher-James DeLorenz, who was a law clerk at Cannon until August 2024, according to Savage.
• Cannon’s oversight of the “supplemental” grand jury means she is “in charge of litigation such as requests by recipients of subpoenas to quash them, for reasons ranging from expiration of the statute of limitations to claims of privilege, or requests by prosecutors to compel these witnesses to testify under threat of being imprisoned for contempt of court,” Savage reports.

According to Mike Davis – the conservative legal activist who moves shit – the Ft. Pierce grand jury is being used to advance a grand theory that the deep state conspired to strip Donald Trump of his civil rights. Davis was more coy with the New York Times. Cannon, of course, interfered with Trump’s criminal investigation into the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case before he was indicted, then was randomly assigned his case and dismissed the indictment entirely, after dragging out the case for months.

The possibility of using a grand jury under Cannon’s auspices to conduct an open investigation related to the Mar-a-Lago search that digs into Trump’s grievances, vendettas and unresolved scores dating back to the 2016 election has the potential to be the most dangerous and damaging of Trump’s many probes into investigator retaliation.

The Punishment: James Comey Edition

Former FBI Director James Comey filed a new motion Friday to dismiss the indictment against him, bringing together all of last week’s revelations about Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s unusual and possibly fatal handling of the grand jury.

Big revelation in the Abrego Garcia affair

In a statement to WaPo on Friday, Costa Rican Security Minister Mario Zamora Cordero denounced deeply misleading statements made by the Trump administration to the judge in one of the Abrego Garcia cases.

Zamora Cordero said Costa Rica’s offer in August to accept Abrego Garcia and grant him legal status was still valid – which flies in the face of the Trump administration’s claims that Costa Rica would no longer accept him. The Trump administration insists on deporting him to one of several African countries, most recently Liberia, to which he has no prior ties. As I wrote at length last week, the Trump administration has repeatedly defied court orders requiring it to provide a fact witness who can testify in court to its statements regarding Costa Rica.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers immediately informed the judge in his civil case of the new WaPo report, and his lawyers in his criminal case cited the report as further evidence of the vindictive nature of his prosecution, a punishment for exercising his legal rights to challenge his wrongful deportation from the United States to El Salvador earlier this year.

Special protection for Kash Patel’s girlfriend

FBI Director Kash Patel recruited two SWAT-trained FBI agents in Atlanta to protect his girlfriend, an aspiring country music singer, at the NRA’s annual convention last spring, the New York Times reports.

The Arizona fake voter case is not completely dead yet

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced she will ask the state Supreme Court to revive the 2020 Trump fake voter case that was thrown out by the trial judge.

The Epstein files

Trump’s DOJ has renewed its previously rejected request that a federal judge in Florida unseal grand jury testimony regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his confidante Ghislaine Maxwell. In the new motion filed late Friday, Trump’s DOJ cited the recently passed law “requiring the department to disclose its Epstein files” as a basis for renewing its request to the court.

Meanwhile, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton faces a host of complications, including a potential conflict of interest, in responding to the “blunt political directive” he received from Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate only Democrats’ ties to Epstein, Politico reports.

Alito reinstates Texas pro-GOP map

Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary administrative stay allowing Texas to continue using its new pro-GOP congressional district map while the Supreme Court considers whether to stay a lower court’s ruling rejecting the map while the state’s appeal is pending.

Venezuela Watch

• Since taking office 10 months ago, the Trump White House has repeatedly “crushed or circumvented government lawyers” who questioned its deadly high-seas strikes against suspected drug traffickers, WaPo reports.
• Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine is traveling to the region today to meet with U.S. military personnel in Puerto Rico.
• The Trump administration is moving to slap the label “foreign terrorist organization” on Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles, which experts say is neither a cartel, nor a group, nor even a hierarchy.

Corruption: forgiveness edition

Right-wing provocateurs Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl — convicted in Ohio and awaiting sentencing in Michigan for racist robocalls — received $960,000 from former nursing home magnate Joseph Schwartz for their help in seeking a presidential pardon. Schwartz, who was sentenced earlier this year to three years in prison for defrauding the government of $38 million, was pardoned by President Trump on November 14, after serving only three months.

Schwartz isn’t the only client paying Burkman and Wohl for forgiveness help, as NOTUS reported.

Any hot tips? A juicy scuttlebutt? Any interesting ideas? Let me know. For sensitive information, use encrypted methods here.