On Friday, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a new order in the Donald Trump classified documents case adding to the mountain of evidence that she is firmly in the former president’s pocket. Trump appointed Cannon in 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment in the days after he lost the 2020 election. It’s deeply offensive to the rule of law for judges to bend the law to benefit those who put them on the bench. Sadly, Cannon does just that.
Cannon’s new ruling rejected special counsel Jack Smith’s entirely standard request that she order Trump to state whether he intends to rely on an “advice of counsel” defense ahead of the trial, currently scheduled for May 20. Advance notice of the defense helps expedite a trial because defendants asserting it need to provide additional discovery to prosecutors—raising the defense means that defendants must disclose all communications with their attorneys, as the defense waives the attorney–client privilege.
Judge Cannon’s brief order asserted that Smith’s motion was “not amenable to proper consideration at this juncture, prior to at least partial resolution of pretrial motions” and further discovery.
Sound innocuous? It’s anything but. Instead, it’s part of a pattern we’ve already seen of Cannon laying the groundwork for delaying Trump’s trial—until it’s too late for a jury to be empaneled and the case tried to verdict before the election.
She was also separately the judge in an earlier lawsuit that Trump filed trying to stop the government from examining what it obtained with the search warrant, for reasons that made no sense and they couldn’t really articulate. The Trump filings were essentially legal nonsense, so this judge took it upon herself to try to weave together something else for them, that still didn’t make any sense. She was faffing about with appointing a time consuming special master (not at all appropriate for that situation) and trying to find ways to prevent the government from examining the evidence. Jack Smith played along with her but at the same time appealed the legality of any of this to the eleventh circuit (actually pretty conservative circuit too). When they finally got the case they said this is all legal nonsense, you never should have even taken up this complaint, accused them of just doing all this only because he was a former president. It was a pretty crazy opinion to read, they were not happy with her. Case was dismissed and the government was finally able to examine all the evidence they had seized with the search warrant. Whole charade delayed the investigation by at least 6 months.
And then when the government finally file charges after the investigation is complete, she gets pulled, again, to be the judge in this case (randomly apparently but from a very small potential pool). Ugh. So that’s why we have her again. It’s been reported Jack Smith has contemplated filing for her removal from the case. It’s a tall order though and would also delay things. Potentially could be trying to gather even more evidence for bias before trying to make such a play, or could be trying to see if there’s any way he could still get it through in a timely manner while she plays interference for Trump. Either way it’s infuriating, as she’s tying up probably the most solid criminal case against him, probably trying to delay it past the election.