How the Florida judge overseeing Trump’s trial could mess up the Justice Department’s case

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Donald Trump’s federal indictment, which was unsealed Friday, is filled with shocking new accounts of how the former president allegedly mishandled classified information. But revealing who will oversee the case could present unique challenges for the Justice Department.

Aileen Cannon, a former prosecutor in her early 40s who spent two and a half years on the bench, is the same Trump appointee who repeatedly ruled in her favor in a related case. He will now preside over a trial that experts believe could influence the American public’s confidence in the fairness of the court system for years to come. Cannon will guide how quickly the case goes to trial, oversee jury selection and determine what evidence can be presented to the jury.

Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law, predicted the trial would be fair. But he said the former president’s claims that he is being singled out and politically persecuted could undermine public trust in the nonpartisanship of the courts, the Justice Department and the FBI.

“This will be the most important and most watched prosecution in American history,” Gillers said. Is it enough for the public to accept the verdict, whatever it is? Or will they see any result as political? The answers to those questions are as important as the verdict.”

Trump, who has launched another bid for the White House, has cast the government’s case against him as the latest in a long line of politically motivated witch hunts, arguing without evidence that President Joe Biden is trying to get him out of office. race in 2024.

On Saturday, in Trump’s first public statement since the case against him was unsealed on Friday, the former president called it a ridiculous and baseless accusation against me by the Biden administration’s armed Justice Department.

A significant issue before the case even went to trial was how, and how quickly, Cannon resolved pretrial motions. Chief among those is an expected filing by Trump’s defense team to exclude any evidence from his defense attorney at the time, Evan Corcoran.

The indictment makes clear that prosecutors relied on contemporaneous notes Corcoran took of his interactions with Trump, along with his clients’ resistance to turning over the classified documents. At one point, according to the Corcorans’ account, Trump made a plucking motion that seemed to indicate that Corcoran should simply pull classified material from a batch the lawyer planned to return to the government.

In March, a federal judge in Washington, Beryl A. Howell, granted a request from prosecutors to apply the felony fraud exception to Corcoran’s conversations with Trump. The ruling, which is rare, means the foundational legal principle, that attorney-client communications remain secret, because Justice Department lawyers have shown that legal services were used in furtherance of a crime.

Trump’s lawyers strongly criticized Howell’s decision and will likely ask Cannon to block prosecutors from presenting evidence from Corcoran to the trial jury. If Cannon agrees that the jury should not hear all of Corcoran’s evidence, the Justice Department’s case will not be over, but it will be critical.

How, and how quickly, Cannon’s rules regarding the use of classified documents will also take effect at the center of the prosecution’s case. Trump’s lawyers are likely to use delay, a tactic the former president has embraced for decades in legal battles, to their advantage.

A photo of boxes of documents found in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom released with the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump. Justice Department through AP

Brandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security prosecutor and a lead prosecutor in Mueller’s investigation, said the use of classified documents involves a separate process of discovery and prosecution, under the Classified Information Processing Act, or CIPA .

They will create great delay and risk in the trial, he wrote on Twitter, adding that most judges are inexperienced in the process. This process takes time and will be unfamiliar to the judge.

Some legal experts have argued that Trump could have an ally in Cannon, based on his past rulings on classified documents cases.

Cannon, who was born in Colombia and raised in Miami, attended Duke University and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. He then worked as a clerk for a federal appeals court judge in Iowa and in the Washington office of the elite law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

In 2013, Cannon left the firm, returned to Florida and began a job that could affect his handling of the Trump case. For seven years, Cannon worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida, in the major crimes and appellate divisions.

In the spring of 2020, Trump nominated Cannon to the federal bench with the support of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. During a confirmation hearing, Cannon pledged to uphold the rule of law and praised his mothers’ courage in escaping repression in Cuba. Days after the November election, the Senate confirmed Cannon with a bipartisan majority. At first, Cannon’s decisions attracted little public attention.

That changed after FBI agents searched Trumps Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 for classified documents. Cannon was randomly assigned to oversee the ensuing legal battle that ensued between Trumps legal team and the Justice Department.

In the first case, Cannon ruled in favor of the Trumps’ request to appoint a special master of a third-party attorney to review whether documents found by the Justice Department and FBI at Trump’s home are protected by executive privilege, a contention that many legal experts have. dismissed.

He also temporarily blocked parts of the Justice Department’s investigation into the secrecy of top-secret and classified documents obtained by federal agents, while making legal arguments that the Trumps’ team did not make, among them that the former president could damage his reputation if the Justice Department indicted him. (Cannon did not respond to a request for comment.)

Justice Department lawyers appealed, arguing that Trump’s request was simply an effort to delay their work and that executive privilege did not apply in this case. A federal appeals court, with some of its judges appointed by Trump, sided with the Justice Department, and twice overturned Cannon.

To create a special exception here is against our founding principle of Nations that our law applies to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank, the judges wrote in a decision.

The impact of the Cannon decisions is unclear. They could prompt him to be more cautious in prosecuting Trump. Any judge presiding over such an unprecedented, high-stakes trial would also come under intense scrutiny. Whether Trump is found guilty or acquitted, the trial and how it is perceived by the public will likely define Cannon’s career and judicial legacy.

Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University School of Law, said that if Cannon issues rulings that appear to favor Trump, it could undermine public confidence in the fairness of judges. The problem is that he has shown this bias in his previous decisions,” Goodman said. Does his handling of the case harm public confidence in the courts?

Special counsel Jack Smith, speaking about the indictment in Washington on Friday, said: We have a set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Many Trump supporters have made it clear that the criminal charges against Trump will not diminish their support. After the former president was indicted in March by a Manhattan grand jury in a separate case, support for him among Republican voters has surged.

Voted for him from jail, Vince Condra of Fredericksburg, Texas, told NBC News at a Trump rally in Waco, days after that indictment.

Meanwhile, questions remain about how Cannon was assigned, at random, to the Trump trial. Federal courts around the country randomly assign cases to judges but some legal experts are questioning how Cannon was randomly chosen twice to handle Trump cases.

In response to a question, Angela Noble, the chief clerk of the South Florida federal court system, told NBC News that the case was randomly assigned. The New York Times reported that Cannon was chosen at random from about half a dozen federal judges in the West Palm Beach division, where the Trump trial will take place. Noble also told the paper that Cannon would continue to oversee the case unless he recuses himself.

Gillers, the NYU legal ethics expert, called on the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida to review how the case was assigned. It could be innocent, says Gillers. And the clerks’ reassurance is welcome. But the public needs confirmation from the chief judge, who is responsible for case assignments.

The stakes of Trump’s trial are enormous. America’s judicial system has long been criticized for racial, gender and class bias but the first criminal trial of a former president could deepen public doubts and partisan divisions.

Gillers said the trial will serve as an unprecedented, nationwide civics lesson. He refuses to predict what verdict the jury will reach inside the courtroom and what verdict the public will reach outside it. The former president’s trial could reinforce the ideal that the powerful, like all Americans, should be held accountable for their actions, experts say. Or it could cause large numbers of Americans to lose faith in American courts, politics and, potentially, American democracy itself.

Much depends on how prosecutors and judges behave. They should see their role as including education, in language the public can understand, Gillers said. Eventually, a jury may reach a verdict at trial, but the public’s verdict remains unpredictable.

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