There’s only one explanation for Judge Cannon’s ruling, (after delaying any rulings for nearly a year), which she gave on the same day as the salacious sex testimony in Trump’s case.

 “After the election, if Trump wins, Jack Smith gets fired, the case gets dismissed, and Judge Cannon is ready for SCOTUS,” wrote Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, who teaches at the University of Minnesota law school.

This case has long been considered the most straightforward of the four prosecutions of Trump. He clearly took classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, as the government has demonstrated in great detail, and he then refused to give them back when the government demanded them. Trump’s team, aware of his vulnerability, has tried to argue that there are enormous complexities in the classification of the documents that require months of hearings.

A competent, nonpartisan judge — one like Justice Juan Merchan in the New York hush-money case — would have thrown out that kind of nonsense. A novice political acolyte like Cannon uses it like a wrecking ball.