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“US District Judge Aileen Cannon issued her first order since former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith for allegedly mishandling classified information, instructing the parties to get the ball rolling to obtain security clearances for the lawyers who will need them.” CBS News
“After federal agents searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence last year in Palm Beach, Florida as part of their probe, Cannon was thrust into the spotlight when Trump's lawyers asked her to halt the FBI's review of records. Cannon agreed with Trump's lawyers that the FBI should not review the records until an independent third party scrutinized them for materials that could be covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege, legal doctrines that might shield some documents from disclosure… An appeals court later overturned Cannon's decision.” Reuters
Some legal experts have called on Cannon to recuse herself from the current case. Newsweek
Here’s our recent coverage of the indictment. The Flip Side
Here’s our coverage of Cannon’s prior ruling. The Flip Side
The right argues that Cannon has no need to recuse herself from the case.
“President Trump appointed Judge Cannon in 2020. But that can’t be the standard for recusal, or hundreds of judges would be unable to preside, including one third of the Supreme Court. Half the country would argue that there are reasonable questions on the other side about whether Mr. Trump can get impartiality from progressive jurists named by a Democratic President. Most federal judges take their oath of office seriously, regardless of which party is in power…
“The more detailed argument against Judge Cannon is that she gave favorable rulings to Mr. Trump in an earlier stage of the case, and her judgment was ultimately overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals…
“But district courts are reversed all the time, much as appeals courts are overruled by the Supreme Court. That’s how it works. Perhaps Judge Cannon’s mistake was clear to the 11th Circuit, but she’s relatively new to the bench. Any ruling she makes in the Trump case is bound to be appealed to the 11th Circuit, and probably the Supreme Court, so she wouldn’t be the final legal word.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Left-leaning commentators invariably start with the idea that the standard for an appearance of impartiality is whether progressives, liberals, and partisan Democrats criticize the judge. Thus, there is a long and recent history of fairly egregious examples of left-leaning and Democrat-appointed judges refusing to recuse…
“The actual standard for an appearance of impartiality should relate to an objective observer, and that standard is supposed to apply to how a person who knows the facts would analyze the situation. It is not a measurement of how much criticism the judge’s ideological opponents have been able to organize…
“Nor is this a situation comparable to that of Chief Judge Mark Walker in the Disney v. DeSantis case, who had not only ruled with purple prose against DeSantis in a number of different cases — with a dreadful track record of Eleventh Circuit reversals — but had also made comments on the Disney dispute with DeSantis in unrelated lawsuits, thus raising the specter that he had prejudged the case.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
“In the Trump case, a matter in which every single relevant action occurred in Florida, the Biden Justice Department [initially] set up shop in Washington, D.C… where it knew that controversies arising during the grand-jury phase would be decided by Judge Beryl Howell. She is a partisan Democrat. She’s an Obama appointee who was put on the bench after her years of service as Judiciary Committee counsel to Senator Pat Leahy, a dyed-in-the-wool partisan Democrat…
“This forum shopping has been richly rewarded: When Biden prosecutor Jack Smith subpoenaed Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, for testimony and notes of conversations with Trump, Howell ruled that Trump did not have an attorney-client privilege because he was trying to deceive the grand jury, triggering the crime-fraud exception. The resulting testimony from Corcoran is the backbone of the Biden Justice Department’s case against Trump… Under those circumstances, for the media-Democrat complex and its reliable lefty lawyer scholars to be bleating over the random assignment of the case to a Trump-appointed judge is rich.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
The left calls on Cannon to recuse herself from the case.
The left calls on Cannon to recuse herself from the case.
“[Cannon’s earlier decision was reversed] 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.’…
“If another judge had committed similar errors, then perhaps those errors could be attributed to inexperience… But whatever else can be said about Cannon, she was hardly unfamiliar with Fourth Amendment principles governing search warrants when she departed so grievously from them. Cannon spent seven years as a federal prosecutor before becoming a judge, a job that would have required her to develop an intimate familiarity with the rules governing search warrants and seizures by law enforcement.”
Ian Millhiser, Vox
“[Cannon] has infinite tools at her disposal to thwart the prosecution at nearly every turn. Big swings, like tossing out the whole case—a very real possibility in her courtroom of chaos—can be appealed and overturned. But at every step, there are opportunities for sabotage…
“Cannon can try to rig voir dire to help the defense stack the jury with Trump supporters. She can exclude evidence and testimony that’s especially damning to Trump. She can disqualify witnesses who are favorable to the prosecution. She can sustain the defense’s frivolous objections and overrule the prosecution’s meritorious ones…
“She can direct a verdict of acquittal to render the jury superfluous. She can declare a mistrial prematurely for any number of reasons, including lengthy juror deliberations, and stretch out various deadlines to run out the clock. Many of these procedural moves could not be appealed until the proceedings have drawn to a close; appeals courts do not referee every little dispute in a jury trial as they happen. Cannon will be in control.”
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
“Recusal is necessary here to avoid serious concerns about Judge Cannon’s impartiality in the public eye. The judicial recusal rule is about preserving the public’s confidence in the judicial system; it does not require a showing of actual bias. Rather, as the Supreme Court has explained, it simply asks whether ‘an objective observer’ in the public ‘would have questioned [the judge’s] impartiality.’ That is clearly the case with Judge Cannon.”
Norman L. Eisen, Richard W. Painter, and Fred Wertheimer, Slate
Some argue, “If Judge Cannon does err in a way that deviates from treating Mr. Trump like any other federal criminal defendant, Mr. Smith, armed with the previous decisions of the 11th Circuit, has the right to attempt to have her replaced… Ultimately, if Mr. Trump is convicted, better to have it happen before one of his appointees. That will go a long way in tamping down Mr. Trump’s and his supporters’ bogus claims of a ‘witch hunt’ and a politicized prosecution.”
Nick Akerman, New York Times
A libertarian's take
“[Recusal] Motions are almost never — I am tempted to say ‘functionally never’ — granted because of how the judge acted in the case. Almost all of the cases finding that disqualification is mandatory involve an ‘extrajudicial source’ — that is, a sign of bias arising outside the judge’s conduct in the case, like evidence that the judge has stock in a company that’s a party, or previously represented a party as a lawyer, or received information about the case through an extrajudicial source…
“It’s difficult to convey to you what a solid wall of precedent there is on this point… because this belief — that it’s objectively unreasonable to doubt the neutrality of a judge who makes ridiculously partial rulings or says inflammatory things — is immovably ensconced in the judicial mindset but completely ridiculous to most normal people… Any ruling that Judge Cannon must be recused because of her frankly lawless rulings for Trump would be extremely and norm-breakingly unusual.”
Ken White, Popehat Report
