Judge Aileen Cannon, pictured left (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida), Donald Trump’s former White House lawyer Ty Cobb criticizes Cannon’s ruling on CNN, May 7, 2024 (CNN/screengrab)
Following an order delaying Donald Trump’s Espionage Act trial indefinitely, the judge in the Mar-a-Lago case faced another round of criticism on the airwaves and elsewhere, including from a former Trump White House lawyer who said she isn’t “capable of ruling intelligently or fairly” on issues.
It was already apparent that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon was going to have to move the May 20 trial date back when she revealed that Trump’s defense would have more time to file a key notice under the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) to specify whether the defense plans to use classified information obtained from discovery at trial.
But the Cannon order that followed, setting new deadlines for CIPA litigation into July as well as a three-day hearing in late June on a defense motion to compel discovery and the scope of special counsel Jack Smith’s team, concluded by leaving the trial date anyone’s guess. The judge, a Trump appointee, said it would be “imprudent” to set a trial date now considering the number of issues she’s left unresolved.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture—before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming—would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” the order said. “The Court therefore vacates the current May 20, 2024, trial date (and associated calendar call), to be reset by separate order following resolution of the matters before the Court, consistent with Defendants’ right to due process and the public’s interest in the fair and efficient administration of justice.”
While conservatives cheered Cannon’s ruling, framing the hearings on the scope of the prosecution and Trump’s selective prosecution claims as a near “extended mini-trial” of Jack Smith (see also: defense’s evidence mishandling allegations and certain prosecutorial admissions), lawyers on X, MSNBC, and CNN severely criticized Cannon, several of them directly bashing the judge’s intelligence.
Though at least one reporter who’s been in Cannon’s courtroom has since advised against “psycho-analyzing” the judge, former FBI special agent and legal commentator Asha Rangappa concluded that the jurist is “intellectually out of her league” and is operating in “paranoid state” given the special counsel’s prior threat to appeal.
“I think that Judge Cannon is intellectually out of her league and is having some weird analysis paralysis because her personal partisanship makes her place Trump’s bizarre arguments (like that nuclear secrets are his personal records) on par with Smith’s *actual* legal arguments,” Rangappa said on X. “She’s afraid of making any mistake, lest Smith have a basis to appeal and perhaps get her removed, and so in this lost, ineffective, and paranoid state, the best she can hope for is that Trump gets elected and the case just goes away. So that’s her play.”
I think that Judge Cannon is intellectually out of her league and is having some weird analysis paralysis because her personal partisanship makes her place Trump’s bizarre arguments (like that nuclear secrets are his personal records) on par with Smith’s *actual* legal…
— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) May 8, 2024
Ty Cobb, Trump’s former White House lawyer during the Mueller probe, was already on record with full-throated criticisms of Cannon’s decision-making as legally “embarrassing.” He went a step beyond on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Tuesday.
“All she’s really done today is make official what everybody, including Jack Smith, already knew which was: She had no intention of getting this case to trial and she wasn’t competent to get this case to trial,” Cobb said. “She talks about her duty to fully and fairly consider the pending motions. She’s had months to do that and did very little. She’s ruled on only three of the 12 motions to dismiss — all of which could have been easily resolved by now.”
Then came the sharpest criticisms.
“This is something that, I think it was always her objective frankly to prevent this from going to trial, but also I think her inability — wholesale inability — to do it was made palpable,” he said, chalking up the decision to a “combination of bias and incompetence.”
Cobb said that the hearing on the scope of the prosecution team would not have been set by any other judge.
“[T]hat’s a frivolous motion, no other judge would actually have a hearing on that. But she has scheduled one,” he said, describing the judge’s moves as “really inexplicable” and “tragic” for the country.
“She has not honored the public’s interest for one day in this case, as she has sat in her office apparently paralyzed from ruling on easily resolvable motions. And sadly, this case will not go to trial — notwithstanding the fact that it’s one of the most important cases in history and could have easily been tried in advance of the election,” Cobb continued.
In parting shots, Cobb stated that Cannon is “not capable of ruling intelligently or fairly on most of the motions that will be pending and certainly classified information issues.” He predicted that Cannon will be removed from the case before trial but acknowledged her latest order would not plausibly form the basis of such an effort.
At least one other figure from the Mueller investigation era also appeared to be perplexed by Cannon’s “struggling with the merits” of the Espionage Act case despite her being privy to the classified documents involved.
“Really worth noting that the Court has actually seen all of the highly classified docs at issue that were not returned to Archives and DOJ—and still appears to be struggling with the merits of the case,” commented former Mueller probe prosecutor Brandon Van Grack.
Former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Renato Mariotti, for one, agreed with Cobb there’s essentially “nothing” Jack Smith can do to speed up the court calendar that Cannon has set.
“Realistically there is nothing Jack Smith can do to move the Mar-a-Lago case forward to trial before the election. Judges have extremely broad discretion over their trial calendar, which is what gives Judge Cannon the ability to avoid setting a trial date at this time,” Mariotti said on X.
Even so, other criticisms blamed Cannon for “literally” engineering the trial delay herself by not resolving pending motions.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat in Connecticut and lawyer, chimed in Wednesday by calling Cannon’s rulings “aberrant” and “erratic” enough to hasten her exit from the case.
“The kind of aberrant & erratic decisions made by this judge raise serious questions about whether she should be sitting on a case.. that’s so highly challenging,” Blumenthal said, according to CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane.
Along similar lines, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday, legal correspondent Lisa Rubin attributed the decisions Cannon has and hasn’t made to her being in over her head and to “anxiety.”
“This is a judge who is overwhelmed and is second guessing herself at every corner. She seems to be overwhelmed with anxiety about the import of the case. And so, a combination of insecurity in your own decisions, the gravity of the case before you, and maybe also some inclination to slow-walk where you don’t have trust in yourself, that’s a toxic brew and, you know, we are all drinking it right now,” Rubin said.
“[Aileen Cannon] is a judge who is overwhelmed and is second guessing herself at every corner.”
— @lawofruby on the indefinite delay of Trump’s classified documents case pic.twitter.com/TBKMggSBTK
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) May 8, 2024
CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, the former Obama administration ethics czar, ultimately predicted, like Cobb, that the end result will be: No Mar-a-Lago trial start this year. If that happens and if Trump wins the 2024 election, the federal case disappearing is viewed as a fait accompli.
“It’s an atrocious decision. It’s the latest in a series of blunders dating back to her interfering with the investigation of these classified documents alleged mishandling before the indictment was even brought,” Eisen said in one CNN segment. “And she was severely criticized by extremely conservative judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals twice for her behavior there. But unfortunately, there’s very little that can be done about it at this stage. It is a miscarriage of justice nevertheless.”
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