Judge Christopher Cooper isn’t just an Obama judge, he was on the Obama transition team. And he’s still acting like it.
Cooper complained that the Durham filings had created a “sideshow” and actually urged the team to correct “misrepresentations”.
A federal judge delivered a warning to special counsel John Durham on Thursday after recent court filings became fodder for pro-Trump media and prompted incendiary allegations from the former president himself.
“Keep in mind that the pleadings in this case are under a microscope and may be employed for one reason or another by folks for reasons that have nothing to do with the ultimate issues in this case,” U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper said after offering the attorneys working for Durham a chance to correct any “misinterpretation” of their earlier filings. They declined.
That’s a strange warning and quite inappropriate.
Cooper insists that he’s the only audience for the filings and yet continues to be obsessed with what the media and conservatives make of them.
Cooper stopped short of granting Sussmann’s motion to strike the information altogether from the docket. He noted that much of it would likely have come out anyway, either in pretrial motions or at a trial in the case.
“I extend a presumption of good faith to all counsel, especially government counsel,” he said. “I’m not going to strike anything from the record. … Striking it will not unring the bell and will probably make the bell ring even louder.”
Again, Cooper is oriented toward how the information is going to be seen on the outside. If he’s the only audience that matters, then there’s no problem. And yet he’s thinking about this so much that he’s worried about the Streisand effect.
“Until we swear a jury in this case,” the judge said, “you folks have an audience of one: me.”
And yet Cooper is obsessed with keeping damaging information about his political allies from being made public.
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