Inset: Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida). Background: Republican Candidate for President Donald Trump attends the Building America’s Future, Southeastern Pennsylvania Roundtable at the Drexelbrook Event Center on October 29, 2024 in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. (Matt Bishop/imageSPACE/Sipa USA).
While Democrats pore over their electoral failures and Republicans look to count their newly-won treasures, coalition, and power, many political players will be jockeying for position come January 2025.
One woman is situated — perhaps higher and better than most — as a bright star-ascendant: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the lone Article II judge sitting in the provincial Fort Pierce, Florida, courthouse.
The Colombia-born judge is a former federal prosecutor and corporate lawyer. She was nominated by Trump in May 2020 and confirmed during the lame duck period of his fist term in office, in mid-November 2020 — after the 45th president was soundly defeated by Joe Biden.
In June 2023, equal parts jurisdictional choices by special counsel Jack Smith and pure chance led Cannon to oversee the Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution in the Southern District of Florida. And that random assignment would yield dividends for the defense.
Amid record heat this past summer, Cannon set a precedent of her own — though one that does not necessarily have any precedential value in the legal sense of the term — by dismissing the Mar-a-Lago indictment based on the idea that Smith was improperly appointed (and similarly improperly funded) to his position as special counsel. This was a novel piece of judicial reasoning — but not one that was created out of whole cloth.
Cannon’s opinion strongly leaned into, cited, and relied on the understanding of the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution advanced by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The analysis offered by Thomas came by way of a concurrence tacked onto the landmark ruling where Chief Justice John Roberts created the concept of presidential immunity for criminal acts.
Not lost on some observers, however, was the precise day the Mar-a-Lago case was dismissed: July 15, 2024, the first day of this year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“Trump filed his motion to dismiss the indictment under the Appointments Clause 144 days ago,” Brian Greer, a Just Security contributor and former attorney at the CIA’s Office of General Counsel posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Cannon decided to dismiss it on the opening day of the RNC. This is her application to be appointed to the Supreme Court — just blatant political corruption by the judiciary.”
While Trump’s critics pointed fingers, his partisans raised fists.
“It’s good to see some sanity returned to our judicial system,” Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, said on X.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee went even further to celebrate the ruling, calling it “another win for President Trump” in one X post. Then, in a follow-up post, the committee shared photos of Cannon and Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas with the caption “American heroes.”
The president-elect even personally praised Cannon at a campaign event earlier this year, describing her as “a brilliant woman.”
Now, Cannon’s name has increasingly been cited by onlookers, and those close to the president-elect, as someone likely to receive a promotion in the upcoming presidential administration.
Late last month, ABC News obtained a document from someone inside the Trump campaign that listed Cannon as one of the two best candidates to replace Attorney General Merrick Garland — second only to former Trump administrator SEC chair Jay Clayton.
As Law&Crime previously reported, that documented preference for Cannon among the incoming president’s inner circle prompted Trump attempted assassination suspect Ryan Routh, 58, to argue further in support of an existing motion asking the judge to recuse herself from his case, which she then pointedly declined to do.
And, while wound-licking and chest-bumping continued in the aftermath of the soon-to-be 47th president’s lopsided Electoral College win, scores of Democrats and Republicans on X raised the idea of Cannon being appointed to fill a retiring justice’s seat on the nation’s high court. Though opinions on such a move varied.
“Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas will be calling the SCOTUS HR department tomorrow to check into their retirement-benefit plans, while Aileen Cannon calls Georgetown Day and St Albans for parent tours,” the Columbia Journalism Review’s Bill Grueskin said on X.
On Wednesday, as the dust settled politically, Cannon directed her staff to put ashes to ashes on the Mar-a-Lago case juridically — at least in her bright and quiet part of the Sunshine State.
The special counsel, of course, has appealed the dismissal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. That effort, for all intents and purposes, is now little more than prosecutorial dead letter.
A terse, one-line order almost certainly spikes the case for the last time as the court’s “Final Judgment.” The docket notes: “[T]he Clerk of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida certifies that the record is complete for purposes of this appeal.”
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