Joyce Vance: Judge Aileen Cannon “Lives in Trump’s Hip Pocket”

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor who explains legal issues to the lay public. Her writing is clear, concise, and free of legalese..

She writes here about Judge Aileen Cannon, who has almost single-handedly protected Trump from facing criminal prosecution by her tactics and rulings.

Her post is titled, “If DOJ Is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon Is His Judge.” I have heard speculation that if Alito or Thomas should retire, Trump may well replace him with Cannon because she saved him from trial and ignominy.

In her latest ruling, a few days ago, she barred the public release of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s report about Trump and his retention of classified documents after leaving office. As Vance says, the public release of such reports is routine. But Judge Cannon saw something in the report that might be embarrassing for Trump, so she blocked their release.

Hopefully, a higher court will overrule her or some anonymous person who has the report will post it on the Internet.

I am not pasting Vance’s commentary in full. I urge you to open the link and finish reading.

Vance writes:

South District of Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon has history with Donald Trump. He appointed her to the bench in May 2020. She was confirmed that November. Then came the June 2023 indictment of Trump by federal prosecutors. It landed on her desk.

Some judges would have recused. There is no precedent, because no former president had been indicted previously. But a reasonable jurist might have thought that the public wouldn’t have confidence in the objectivity of a judge sitting on a criminal case against the president who appointed her. It would have been the safe bet for someone concerned about the integrity of the judicial branch of government. Judge Cannon did not recuse.

To be fair, the government didn’t ask her to. That turned out to be a miscalculation.

From the earliest moments of the case, even before it was indicted, Cannon’s decisions were questionable. Mar-a-Lago was searched on August 8, 2022, well before Trump’s indictment and Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel. Cannon was asked to consider the unusual motion Trump’s lawyers filed to restrict the Justice Department’s ability to use evidence seized during the search. It was an attempt to impose an unprecedented (back when that word still had meaning) constraint on the government’s ability to investigate a criminal case. 

But Cannon agreed with Trump’s position, assigning a special master to review seized documents. Her decision dramatically slowed the progress prosecutors were able to make. On December 1, shortly after Jack Smith’s appointment in November, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Cannon. The per curiam order did not mince words: “This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation. The answer is no.”

The manifestly unmeritorious decision she made in Trump’s favor pre-indictment was a harbinger of everything that was to come. The case was indicted on June 8, 2023. There is no way to know how much the loss of four months in giving prosecutors full access to the evidence against Trump contributed to the ultimate demise of the case, which was dismissed without going to trial on Smith’s own motion, once Trump was reelected. 

Once Trump and his co-defendants were charged, Judge Cannon ruled in their favor at virtually every opportunity. She ruled for them on pretrial motions, like this one, after delaying. She rejected a request by prosecutors, a fairly routine one, to protect witness identities pre-trial. A timeline of her rulings and the delays they engendered is set out at length in this ABC report. Ultimately, Smith’s request to dismiss the case went to the Eleventh Circuit because Cannon had dismissed the prosecution in July 2024, accepting the highly questionable defense theory that Jack Smith’s appointment was unlawful. That decision was on appeal when Trump was elected. 

We discussed Cannon’s decision in this post, where I noted that “Until today, every federal judge that considered the issue—all eight of them—unanimously found that attorneys general have the constitutional authority to appoint a special counsel. But Judge Aileen Cannon disagrees. In a 93-page opinion, nicely timed for the first day of the Republican convention … she dismissed the entire indictment.”

But pursuant to DOJ rules that prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president, Smith had little choice but to ask the Eleventh Circuit to dismiss the case as to Trump. When he did so, he wrote: “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”

That catches us up, more or less, to what happened today, when Judge Cannon ruled on what she characterizes as two “unopposed” motions, one by Trump, one by his co-defendants, both designed to prevent release of Volume II of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, the one covering the Mar-a-Lago case. If it weren’t such a serious matter, “unopposed” would be funny—these motions preventing the routine release of a special counsel’s report are only unopposed because the Attorney General, who should have filed an opposition, lives in Trump’s hip pocket. Cannon has managed to hold up the release of Volume II for over a year at this point.

Please open the link to finish this valuable analysis.