The legal community is side-eyeing judge who dismissed Trump documents case

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon dismissed the prosecution in Donald Trump’s classified documents case. The convicted felon faced more than three dozen federal charges of mishandling classified documents. This is just the latest partiality to Trump provided by Cannon, who was appointed to the federal position in the Southern District of Florida by Trump in 2020. Even before charges were filed against Trump, Cannon was making headlines regarding federal prosecutors’ investigation of documents found at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI raid in August 2022. Cannon was judge-shopped by Trump’s legal team, and assigned to Trump's appeal against the investigation. Her first move was to assist Trump's legal team in cleaning up its somewhat convoluted appeal. Having helped shepard the appeal into coherence, she then sided with Trump’s defense and appointed a "special master"—a third party who looks things over to determine if there’s attorney-client privilege or other issues—to review the documents seized by the FBI. The move temporarily barred agents and prosecutors from reviewing them. According to Slate, it marked the first time a judge had stopped an investigation before an indictment.  Paul Rosenzweig, a Department of Homeland Security official under former President George W. Bush, called Cannon’s intervention “a special law just for Donald Trump by a Trump appointee, and it is unmoored from precedent, insupportable in law, will not be approved of by anybody who isn’t a Trump fanatic.” When Judge Raymond J. Dearie, the special master whom Cannon had appointed, tried to do his job by ordering that Trump’s lawyers assert the validity of the documents seized, Cannon overruled him. She also overruled Dearie’s attempt at creating a reasonable timeline to proceed in. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals filled with two Trump-appointed judges and a third “ultra conservative” judge, ended this farce, and excoriated Cannon in their decision: The law is clear, we cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our case law limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations. Trump was subsequently indicted, in a case that Anthony Michael Kries, a professor of election and employment law at Georgia State University described to the BBC as the “strongest case legally” against Trump and “absolutely airtight.” Unfortunately, Cannon was then assigned to preside over the case.  She has since delayed the case, refusing to set a start date for trial, piling on postponements of previously stated deadlines, and repeatedly asking for the refiling of motions. Each move by Cannon has resulted in questions concerning both her experience and political leanings. Cannon’s first intervention into the Trump classified documents story was characterized as “deeply problematic” by legal experts. Monday’s decision, after two years of Cannon’s legal misbehavior, has led experts like Noah Rosenblum, an assistant professor at NYU School of Law, to call the dismissal “bonkers,” exclaiming, “She is just making things up.” RELATED STORY: Trump-appointed judge tries to let Trump off for stealing state secrets Campaign Action