Not long after special counsel Jack Smith filed a damning indictment against former President Donald Trump — accusing Trump of deliberately withholding classified federal documents that he had no right to possess in the first place — Smith received what could be the worst possible news about his chances of securing a conviction.
The case is assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee to the federal district court in southern Florida. Cannon, a fairly young judge who was confirmed to the bench after Trump lost reelection but before President Joe Biden took office, has come onto the national stage so far only once: for her extraordinary efforts to sabotage the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s possession of classified documents.
A panel of three appellate judges, two also appointed by Trump, eventually stepped in and neutralized this sabotage — in an opinion that identified about a dozen errors in her decisions. Eventually, a second panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that she never had jurisdiction to interfere with the DOJ’s investigation in the first place.
That latter opinion — which was handed down by a panel that included two Trump appointees and Chief Judge William Pryor, a prominent figure in the conservative Federalist Society — labeled Cannon’s decisions favoring Trump “a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations” and warned that Cannon’s approach “would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
There’s no guarantee that Cannon takes the same cavalierly partisan approach to Trump’s criminal trial as she did to the FBI’s investigation. But it’s enough of a concern that her assignment to the trial, which her court says was made randomly using the ordinary process where judges are assigned to preside over criminal trials, immediately sparked alarm among a wide range of ideologically diverse…
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