It was a year ago this month Donald TrumpThe classified documents case was assigned to, of all people, the U.S. District Court judge Aileen Kanon, a controversial Trump appointee. According to a striking new report from The New York Times, two of the lawyer’s more senior colleagues at the same court have urged Cannon to hand the case over to someone else.
Altonaga, it’s worth noting for context, is one George W Bush appointed.
The Times’ report has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, but if true, it is a rare and important look behind the scenes.
According to the Times, a judge called Cannon early in the trial and made a logistical argument for transferring the case to a colleague: Cannon’s courthouse is a two-hour drive from the Miami courthouse where the grand jury was located.
When that didn’t work, the local chief judge encouraged the lawyer to pass on the case for optical reasons, given a related controversy months earlier over Cannon and the underlying Trump investigation, which made Cannon look incompetent and biased.
This pitch didn’t work either.
Regardless, the judges who encouraged Cannon to do the responsible thing offered sound advice anyway. The Trump-appointed conservative really lacked the relevant experience to oversee such a case, and she really insisted, leaving little doubt about her ideological pro-Trump leanings.
Moreover, we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that those who urged Cannon to turn the case over to someone better suited to hear it were right. The Times report added: “Judge Cannon has been hostile to prosecutors, moving slowly on pretrial motions and indefinitely delaying the trial, refusing to set a date for it to begin even though both the prosecution and the defense told her they could be prepared to start this summer.”
She has also repeatedly given observers reason to question her competence, lent credibility to questions that legal experts consider absurd, and justified procedural delays by pointing to the problems she has created.
I am reminded again of an infamous quote attributed to Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
