Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon was assigned to oversee the former president in June 2023 Donald TrumpIn the secret documents case, two more senior colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to set aside the case and transfer it to another lawyer, according to two people briefed on the talks.
The judges who approached Cannon — including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga — each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she dismissed the high-profile case and let it go to another judge. , the two people said.
But Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, wanted to stay the case and refused the judges’ requests. Her assignment drew attention because she had little trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Trump by intervening in a way that helped him in the criminal investigation that led to his indictment, only to be reversed in a critical rebuke by a conservative panel of the court of appeals. .
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The extraordinary and previously undisclosed attempt by Cannon’s colleagues to convince her to step aside adds a new dimension to mounting criticism of her handling of the case.
According to attorneys there, she broke with the common practice of federal judges in the Southern District of Florida of delegating some preliminary investigations to a magistrate — in this case Judge Bruce E. Reinhart. Although he is subordinate to her, Reinhart is an older and much more experienced lawyer. In 2022, he was the one who signed an FBI warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club and residence, for highly sensitive government files that Trump kept after leaving office.
Since then, Cannon has shown hostility toward prosecutors, slowing down pretrial motions and postponing the trial indefinitely, refusing to set a date for it to begin even though both the prosecution and defense told her they could finish are to start this summer.
But Trump’s lawyers have also urged her to delay any trial until after the election, and her handling of the case has all but ensured that they will succeed in that strategy. Should Trump regain the White House, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case.
As Cannon’s handling of the case comes under increasing scrutiny, her critics have suggested she may be in trouble for Trump — or both.
Against that backdrop, word of her colleagues on the court’s early efforts to convince her to step aside — and the significance of her decision not to do so — has spread to other federal judges and the people who appoint them know.
Neither Cannon nor Altonaga responded directly to requests for comment, including via emails sent through District Court Clerk Angela E. Noble. Noble later wrote in an email: “Our judges do not comment on pending cases.”
It is routine for novice judges to look to more experienced lawyers for informal advice or mentorship as they learn to fill their new roles. And as district chief, Altonaga has a formal role in the administration of the federal judiciary in South Florida.
But ultimately, Cannon is not subject to the authority of her district court elders. Like any Senate-confirmed, presidentially appointed judge, she has a lifetime term of office and independent status, and is free to choose to ignore such advice.
The two people who discussed efforts to convince her to hand over the case spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the case. All had been briefed on it by several federal judges in the Southern District of Florida, including Altonaga.
Neither identified the second federal judge in Florida who contacted Cannon. One of the people confirmed the attempt to convince Cannon to step aside, but did not describe the details of the conversations the two judges had with her. The other person offered more details.
This person said that all outreach was done by phone. The first judge Cannon called, this person said, suggested to her that it would be better if the case were handled by a lawyer based closer to the county’s busiest courthouse in Miami, where the grand jury that brought the indictment had been seated. filed against Trump.
The Miami courthouse also had a secure facility approved to hold the type of top secret information that would be discussed in the preliminary investigation and used as evidence in the case. Cannon is the only judge at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive north of Miami. When she was assigned to the case, the courthouse in Fort Pierce did not have a secure location.
Because Cannon kept the business, taxpayers have since had to pay to build a secure facility there — known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.
After that initial argument failed to convince Cannon to step aside, the person said, Altonaga called.
The chief judge — an appointee of President George W. Bush — is said to have made a more pointed argument: Allowing Cannon to oversee the trial would be a bad option because of what happened during the criminal investigation that led to Trump’s indictment. of illegally retaining national security documents after leaving office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.
In August 2022, the FBI obtained a search warrant from Reinhart to go to Mar-a-Lago in search of the remaining classified documents that Trump failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena.
The agents found thousands of government files that Trump had kept even though under the Presidential Records Act they should have gone to the National Archives when he left office. Among the files the FBI recovered were more than a hundred files marked as classified, including some at the most restricted level.
Shortly after the search, Trump filed a lawsuit against the government, protesting the seizure of the materials, which he claimed were his personal belongings, and asking for the appointment of a special master to search them. Instead of letting Reinhart hear that lawsuit, as would be normal procedure, Cannon opted to decide the case.
She shocked legal experts across ideological lines, banned investigators from accessing the evidence and appointed a special master, although she said that person would only make recommendations to her and she would make the final decisions.
Cannon’s decision was unusual in part because she intervened before any charges had been filed, treating Trump differently than typical targets of search warrants based on his perceived special status as a former president.
She also ordered the special captain to consider whether some of the seized files should be permanently withheld from investigators with executive privilege, an idea widely seen as questionable because it has never been successfully done in a criminal case.
Prosecutors appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. In a dismissal, a three-judge panel, including two Trump appointees, reversed her order, ruling that she never had the legal authority to intervene in the first place.
“It is indeed extraordinary that a warrant would be executed in the home of a former president – but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise authorizes the judiciary to interfere with an ongoing investigation,” the panel wrote .
Limits on when courts can interfere with a criminal investigation “apply regardless of who the government is investigating,” it added. “Creating a special exception here would violate our nation’s founding principle that our law applies ‘to all, regardless of numbers, wealth, or rank.’”
Trump’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. In December 2022, Cannon dismissed Trump’s lawsuit.
Six months later, the Miami grand jury indicted Trump, alleging in detail how he stored highly sensitive documents in a bathroom and on a stage at Mar-a-Lago and persistently pushed his aides and lawyers to undermine the efforts of to thwart the Ministry of Justice. the National Archives to retrieve them.
According to the county clerk’s office, the new case was entered into a system that would randomly assign the case to one of the few judges whose chambers are in the West Palm Beach division, which includes Mar-a-Lago, or in one of the two adjacent divisions, Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale.
It went to Kanon.
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