The legal community is side-eyeing judge who dismissed Trump documents case

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon dismissed the prosecution in Donald Trump’s classified documents case. The convicted felon faced more than three dozen federal charges of mishandling classified documents. This is just the latest partiality to Trump provided by Cannon, who was appointed to the federal position in the Southern District of Florida by Trump in 2020.

Even before charges were filed against Trump, Cannon was making headlines regarding federal prosecutors’ investigation of documents found at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI raid in August 2022. Cannon was judge-shopped by Trump’s legal team, and assigned to Trump's appeal against the investigation. Her first move was to assist Trump's legal team in cleaning up its somewhat convoluted appeal.

Having helped shepard the appeal into coherence, she then sided with Trump’s defense and appointed a "special master"—a third party who looks things over to determine if there’s attorney-client privilege or other issues—to review the documents seized by the FBI. The move temporarily barred agents and prosecutors from reviewing them. According to Slate, it marked the first time a judge had stopped an investigation before an indictment. 

Paul Rosenzweig, a Department of Homeland Security official under former President George W. Bush, called Cannon’s intervention “a special law just for Donald Trump by a Trump appointee, and it is unmoored from precedent, insupportable in law, will not be approved of by anybody who isn’t a Trump fanatic.”