A few months ago, a top prosecutor in former President Donald Trump’s case stood up in court and told Judge Aileen Cannon that he was concerned about the pace of the proceedings, cautiously expressing his desire to “let the case move forward.” to go’.
Almost immediately, Cannon became defensive.
“I can assure you there is a lot of legal work going on in the background,” she snapped. “So while it may not seem like anything is happening at first glance, a lot of work is being done.”
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In a way, Cannon had a point. Much of what judges do happens out of sight in the sanctity of their chambers.
But during seven public hearings over more than 10 months, Cannon has left an increasingly detailed account of her decision-making skills and judicial temperament.
The portrait that has emerged is that of a diligent but inexperienced and often insecure judge whose unwillingness to rule decisively on even minor cases has left one of the country’s most important criminal cases bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues .
She rarely makes statements that explain her thinking in a way that might reveal her legal influences or any guiding philosophy. And that has made the hearings, which took place at the U.S. District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, all the more important in assessing her handling of the case.
Regardless of her motives, Cannon has effectively jeopardized the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the clearest of the four Trump faces.
She has accomplished this in large part by providing a serious hearing on almost every issue — no matter how far-fetched — that Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy to avoid bringing the case to trial. the judge comes.
It seems increasingly likely that the documents case will not go to a jury before Election Day, and that the only trial Trump will face this year will be the one now ending in Manhattan, where jurors are expected to begin on Wednesday to deliberate on whether he lied forged documents. business data related to hush money payments to a porn actor.
Still, the coming weeks will bring Cannon’s handling of the Florida case into even sharper focus.
She could soon rule on a request from Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the former president’s two federal prosecutions, to ban Trump from making public statements that endanger federal agents working on the documents case could bring. The move, which the judge denied on procedural grounds this week, came in response to the former president’s unsubstantiated claim that the FBI had the authority to use deadly force against him during the search two years ago of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and hometown Florida.
After a hearing in June, Cannon will also have to make a key decision on whether to give Trump’s lawyers access to communications between Smith’s team and top national security officials. The lawyers made that request in hopes of substantiating their claim that the so-called deep state conspired with the Biden administration to bring the charges.
A former federal prosecutor, Cannon graduated from Duke University and the University of Michigan Law School, where she joined the conservative Federalist Society.
She was nominated by Trump to the federal bench during his final months as president and was confirmed by the Senate just days after he was declared the loser of the 2020 election.
She was already under scrutiny when she was given the case with classified documents last June, because of a decision she made well before charges were filed. That ruling, which halted the investigation into Trump until an independent arbitrator sifted through piles of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago, was so legally dubious that the appeals court that presided over it overturned it in unusually scathing terms.
Since then, Cannon has shown little of her human side in court and has taken a businesslike approach to the proceedings, which always start in the same way.
She invariably enters her courtroom on time, first warning those on the stand not to use electronic devices and reminding them of her rule forbidding standing up while a hearing is in progress. She then explains the issues and talks about the documents she has received that will inform the conversation.
Even though she has only been on the bench for four years and has little experience handling criminal cases, it is often clear that Cannon has done her homework.
For example, in mid-March she discussed the most important elements of the Espionage Act with Emil Bove, one of Trump’s lawyers and an expert in the field of confidential information matters. At one point, she pushed back on Bove’s claim that a section of the law requiring “national defense information” to be present in all documents charged in an indictment was written so vaguely that it was essentially non- was enforceable.
“There have been, I think, quite a few defense information lawsuits,” Cannon said. “So it would be difficult to say, based on the current state of the decision-making authority, that this point in itself is unconstitutionally vague.”
Even though it meant he lost the point, Bove had to agree.
“I can’t stand the way your Honor phrased that,” he said.
That conversation, however, was a far cry from the one that took place last week when Cannon debated a common theory of legal liability called the Pinkerton Rule with Jay Bratt, one of the plaintiffs. The rule means that all members of a conspiracy can be held responsible for all crimes committed by their co-conspirators.
Bratt said the rule would likely apply to Trump’s dealings with his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago employees accused of conspiring with the former president to stop Trump’s repeated attempts hinder the government’s ability to recover the properties. classified materials.
Cannon seemed a bit perplexed and asked Bratt what authority he wanted to rely on in applying the Pinkerton Rule. Bratt seemed almost sheepish at having to explain things so simply to her.
“So the authority is Pinkerton,” he said and began a quick explanation.
One of Cannon’s most persistent habits is her tendency to ask the same question multiple times. It’s never quite clear whether she doesn’t understand the answers she’s given or is trying to resist them.
During last week’s hearing, she made this statement to Nauta’s attorney, Stanley Woodward Jr., as she considered his request to order prosecutors to provide him with internal communications that could help support his claims that the case against his client was initiated with a vengeance.
The communication Woodward was seeking related to a meeting he attended nearly two years ago at the Justice Department where, he claims, Bratt threatened to derail a judgeship he had applied for if he could not get Nauta persuade them to work together against Trump.
When Cannon asked Woodward what he actually wanted from the government, his answer seemed simple enough: all the messages exchanged by prosecutors that mentioned his name. The judge then asked a second time, telling Woodward to give it to her “slowly.”
But even after that, it seemed that she was still a little confused.
“Okay,” she said, this time referring to the notes she had taken. “So I understand your request. It is, quote, “All documents, communications regarding Mr. Woodward.” ”
Something similar happened moments later when Cannon turned to David Harbach, one of the prosecutors, to discuss Woodward’s request.
Harbach had just spent more than five minutes telling the judge that Woodward’s claims of misconduct were a “fantasy” and that he had no legal right to pry into the government’s private communications.
But Cannon seemed to miss his point, asking Harbach if he was implying that prosecutors didn’t have the messages Woodward wanted. No, he told her, again explaining that Woodward had failed to provide any evidence that would even be worth giving what he wanted.
“So I guess you’re not sure?” she asked.
No, Harbach said for the third time, again trying to explain that Woodward’s description of the August 2022 meeting was completely inaccurate and that the normal legal threshold for turning over private communications had simply not been met.
“I know you disagree with the actual recitation from the August meeting,” Cannon said. “But would that provide a basis for the discovery request?”
Now clearly frustrated, Harbach said as clearly as he could that Woodward’s request had no basis in fact or law.
“This is what I’m trying to tell you,” he almost shouted at the judge.
That argument ultimately ended with Cannon telling Harbach to “calm down.” It was emblematic of the dwindling reserves of patience between Cannon and the prosecutors.
In October, for example, Cannon lashed out at Harbach during another hearing over whether Woodward had a conflict of interest in the case. The question revolved around the fact that Woodward represented Nauta, one of the defendants, and had previously represented a man likely to testify for the government at trial.
When Harbach raised concerns about Woodward having to question a former client — a situation that could easily lead to a conflict — Cannon chided him for not mentioning that possibility in his written submissions before the hearing.
Citing Harbach’s “last-minute introduction of an uninformed matter,” she abruptly ended the hearing and attacked the prosecutor for “wasting the court’s time.”
But she behaved very differently at the hearing last week, when Woodward made several arguments about his claims of vindictive persecution, which had never appeared in his files. Cannon barely seemed to notice that he had strayed from his script, let alone reprimand him.
There’s one topic the defense likes to talk about that always seems to put Cannon on edge: Trump’s presidential campaign. While she has given his lawyers the space to use their briefings to make political arguments, she has repeatedly silenced them when they tried to raise the subject of politics in court.
In early March, Bove began arguing a highly technical legal issue by complaining that Trump should not have appeared in court that day at all, but should have campaigned instead.
Apparently annoyed, Cannon interrupted.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Can we talk about the actual legal issues?”
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