Legal experts: 'Compromised' Judge Cannon is 'slow-walking' trial of 'benefactor' Trump
US District Judge Aileen Cannon — who was appointed to her lifetime position by former President Donald Trump just a few months before he was voted out of office — is playing a long game to "sabotage" both the classified documents trial she's overseeing, as well as other prosecutors, according to two legal experts.
In a recent essay for Slate, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut and Harvard law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe argued that Judge Cannon's "bias" is showing through her various decisions that will inevitably delay the scheduled May 20 trial. They cited her decision last week to deny Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's motion to simply compel Trump to disclose whether he planned to use the "advice of counsel" defense. That defense requires additional discovery, in which Trump would waive attorney-client privilege and turn over additional communications with his attorneys to prosecutors.
Cannon argued that compelling disclosure was improper until other pre-trial motions had been settled — one of which has a February deadline. Aftergut and Tribe said that decision, which was issued in November, was a signal that the Trump-appointed judge was "slow-walking" the pre-trial process.
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"Sound innocuous? It’s anything but. Instead, it’s part of a pattern we’ve already seen of Cannon laying the groundwork for delaying Trump’s trial — until it’s too late for a jury to be empaneled and the case tried to verdict before the election," Aftergut and Tribe wrote.
They continued the essay by suggesting that Cannon — who got a "humiliating admonishment" from the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals after it reversed her September 2022 ruling to appoint a special master to adjudicate the FBI's seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago — was not only seeking to delay the May 20 trial, but to frustrate efforts by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to move her trial date up to May.
"By continuing to maintain the trial date while rendering the date virtually impossible to keep, Cannon evidently hopes to maintain plausible deniability," Aftergut and Tribe wrote. "[I]t’s difficult to imagine that anything that deserves to be called justice will emerge from a criminal proceeding over which Cannon presides in which the fate of her benefactor, and thus her own career, is at stake."
"It may well be that [Jack] Smith is biding his time before moving to recuse this manifestly compromised jurist," they continued. "He may be waiting until she finally does what seems inevitable — orders that the trial date be vacated. If so, by that time, he is likely to have even more evidence of Cannon’s bias, both actual and apparent, to place before the court of appeals."
READ MORE: Experts: Judge Cannon 'running out the clock' for Trump after denying Jack Smith motion
Read Aftergut and Tribe's full essay by clicking here.
