Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon was assigned to oversee former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case in June 2023, two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida asked her to abandon the case and send it to another lawyer to be handed over to two people who were informed about the discussions.
The judges who addressed Judge Cannon – including Chief Judge of the Southern District of Florida Cecilia M. Altonaga – asked her all to consider whether it would be better if she dismissed the high-profile case and left it to someone else Judge, the two people said.
But Judge Cannon, appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and rejected the justices’ requests. Her assignment drew attention because she has little trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Mr. Trump, intervening in a way that helped him in the criminal investigation that led to his indictment, only to be met with a sharp criticism from a conservative to be rejected by the Court of Appeal.
The extraordinary and previously undisclosed attempt by Judge Cannon’s colleagues to persuade her to resign adds another dimension to the growing criticism of the way she has handled the case.
According to attorneys there, she broke with the general practice of federal judges in the Southern District of Florida to delegate some pretrial motions to one judge – in this case, Judge Bruce E. Reinhart. While he reports to her, Judge Reinhart is an older and much more experienced lawyer. In 2022, he was the one who signed an FBI search warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club and Florida residence, for highly sensitive government files that Mr. Trump retained after he left office.
Since then, Judge Cannon has shown hostility toward prosecutors, processing pretrial motions slowly and postponing the trial indefinitely. She refused to set a start date, even though both the prosecution and defense had told her they could begin this summer.
But Mr. Trump’s lawyers have also pushed them to delay any trial until after the election, and their handling of the case has all but ensured that this strategy will help them succeed. If Trump takes back the White House, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case.
As Judge Cannon’s handling of the case comes under increasing scrutiny, her critics have suggested that she may be out of her depth, out to get Mr. Trump — or both.
Against this backdrop, word has spread among other federal judges and the people who know them that their colleagues on the bench early on persuaded them to resign – and how significant their decision not to do so was.
Neither Judge Cannon nor Judge Altonaga responded directly to requests for comment, including via email sent through District Court Clerk Angela E. Noble. Ms. Noble later wrote in an email: “Our judges do not comment on pending cases.”
It is routine for novice judges to reach out to more experienced lawyers for informal advice or mentoring as they learn to carry out their new roles. And as district manager, Judge Altonaga has a formal role in administering the federal judiciary in South Florida.
But ultimately, Judge Cannon is not subject to the authority of her district court elders. Like any Senate-confirmed and presidentially appointed judge, she has life tenure and independent standing, and she is free to ignore such advice.
The two people who spoke about efforts to persuade her to drop the case spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Each of them was informed of this by various federal judges in the Southern District of Florida, including Judge Altonaga.
Neither person identified the second Florida federal judge who addressed Judge Cannon. One of the people confirmed efforts to get Judge Cannon to resign, but did not describe the details of the conversations the two justices had with her. The other person offered more details.
This person said all contact was made by telephone. The first judge who called Judge Cannon, this person said, suggested to her that it would be better to have the case handled by a legal professional based closer to the county’s busiest courthouse in Miami, where the grand jury that was hearing Mr. Trump had been accused, had served.
The Miami courthouse also had a secure facility approved to store top secret information that would be discussed in pretrial motions and used as evidence in the case. Judge Cannon is the sole federal court judge in Fort Pierce, two hours north of Miami. When she was assigned to the case, the Fort Pierce courthouse did not have secure facilities.
Since Judge Cannon retained the case, taxpayers have since had to pay for the construction of a secure room called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
After that initial argument failed to persuade Judge Cannon to resign, the person said, Judge Altonaga made a call.
The chief justice – an appointee of former President George W. Bush – is said to have made a stronger argument: It would be bad optics for Judge Cannon to oversee the trial because of what happened during the criminal investigation that led to Mr. Trump’s impeachment on allegations of illegally withholding national security documents after he left office and obstructing the government’s efforts to recover them.
In August 2022, the FBI obtained a search warrant from Judge Reinhart to travel to Mar-a-Lago to search for remaining classified documents that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena.
The agents found thousands of government files that Mr. Trump had kept when, under the Presidential Records Act, they should have gone to the National Archives after he left office. The files seized by the FBI included over 100 classified files, including some of the highest classification levels.
Shortly after the search, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit against the government protesting the seizure of the materials, which he claimed were his personal property, and demanding the appointment of a special master to search them. Rather than leave the lawsuit to Judge Reinhart, as would be the normal procedure, Judge Cannon chose to adjudicate the matter.
She shocked legal experts across ideological lines, barring investigators from accessing the evidence and appointing a special representative, although she said that person would only give her recommendations and she would make the final decisions.
Judge Cannon’s decision was unusual in part because she intervened before charges were filed — and treated Mr. Trump differently than typical targets of search warrants because of his alleged special status as a former president.
She also directed the special representative to consider whether some of the seized files should be permanently kept secret from investigators under executive privilege. This idea was widely viewed as dubious because it was never successfully implemented in a criminal case.
Prosecutors appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. In a recusal, a three-judge panel that included two Trump appointees overturned her order and ruled that she had no authority to intervene at all.
“It is indeed extraordinary that an arrest warrant would be executed at the home of a former president — but not in a way that compromises our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary permission to interfere in an ongoing investigation,” Das wrote Committee.
The restrictions on when courts can intervene in criminal investigations “apply regardless of who the government is investigating,” she added. “Creating a special exception here would contradict our nation’s founding principle that our law ‘applies to all, regardless of number, wealth or rank.'”
Mr Trump’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, but it declined to hear the case. In December 2022, Judge Cannon dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit.
Six months later, a grand jury in Miami indicted Mr. Trump, alleging specifically that he stored highly sensitive documents in a bathroom and on a stage at Mar-a-Lago and persistently pressured his aides and lawyers to undermine justice efforts hinder Ministry and the National Archives to restore them.
According to the county’s usual practices, the clerk said, the new case entered a system that randomly assigns it to one of the few judges whose chambers are in the West Palm Beach division, which includes Mar-a-Lago , or to one of the two adjacent divisions, Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale.
It went to Judge Cannon.
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2024-06-20 20:16:22
www.nytimes.com
