Just one day after former President Donald Trump was slapped with a 49-page indictment listing 37 criminal counts of seven different charges, including obstruction and mishandling of classified documents, prosecutors were hit with the news that Judge Aileen Cannon, nominated by Trump in 2020, will oversee the case.
It remains uncertain whether Cannon will preside over the entire trial, but her review of the case presents a historic twist: Cannon previously gave Trump a highly controversial favorable ruling related to the FBI’s initial search of his Mar-a-Lago residence last year. If Cannon does oversee the trial, that will make Trump the first person in U.S. history to take part in a criminal proceeding in front of a federal judge whom they appointed.
Cannon, 42, has been a member of the arch-conservative Federalist Society since 2005, and was nominated by Trump to a Florida federal court judgeship in 2020. She was little known until last September when she was assigned to the immediate aftermath of the August FBI search on Mar-a-Lago, when federal agents seized thousands of documents, some marked classified, that Trump had stored at his private club.
In a decision widely criticized by legal experts as an extraordinary affront to the separation of powers, Cannon granted Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the documents taken by the FBI, which would have halted the case. Cannon’s decision was eventually overturned by an appeals court stacked with conservative judges in what Slate legal commentator Mark Joseph Stern called “one of the most humiliating appellate smackdowns in recent history.”
After the news broke on Friday, legal analysts speculated whether Cannon had been intentionally assigned to Trump’s criminal case. In an interview with ABC News, a former senior Justice Department official argued that “if the same district and magistrate judges are overseeing the case, that means the court likely considered the indictment to be ‘related’ to the search warrant and intentionally assigned it to those judges.”
As a general policy, the Southern District of Florida randomly distributes cases to its 15 active judges (along with 11 senior judges, who receive a reduced workload), though “it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump lucked out, or if an exception was made,” The New York Times noted.
Though Trump will ultimately have to face a jury of his peers, Cannon would have control over the timeline of the case, and may also have opportunities to exclude evidence.
“When you have classified documents, there is abundant opportunities to slow this down, and if they’ve got a judge who is willing to go along with slowing this down, it becomes very hard to predict when this will go to trial,” Samuel Buell, a white-collar criminal law professor at Duke, told The Times. If Trump can successfully punt the case until after the 2024 presidential election, then a potential Republican president—either Trump himself or another nominee—could shut down the case entirely.
“Cannon’s total lack of principle, combined with her evident incapacity to experience shame, renders her a uniquely favorable jurist for the former president,” Stern wrote on Friday. “If Cannon remains assigned to this case, Trump will not be convicted, no matter how damning the evidence.”
