Lawyers who appeared before Judge Aileen Cannon had some sharp critiques of how she oversaw the courtroom.
Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case, may be in over her head due to a serious lack of experience, according to a new report from CNN.
The news outlet spoke to 10 attorneys who had cases before Cannon in the Southern District of Florida—and they painted a picture of a judge with limited trial experience, who’s prone to getting bogged down byirrelevant legal questionsand struggles to manage her docket of cases efficiently.
Before Trump appointed her to the federal bench in 2020, Cannon was an attorney in the Justice Department for seven years and only took part in four criminal trials. In her four years as a judge, she hasn’t presided over many criminal cases either—and attorneys said it shows.
“She just seems overwhelmed by the process,” one lawyer told CNN. Other lawyers said that she lets small, marginal issues overwhelm the major details of cases. She also has rejected joint motions, agreed upon by both parties in a case with no dispute.
And what will Congress do? They have the power to impeach and convict federal judges. But they’ll do nothing because it’s difficult to do anything without a backbone.
I'm really getting sick and tired of fascists being continually given the benefit of the doubt.
Let's make this very clear: Aileen Cannon is not "in over her head," "getting bogged down," or "overwhelmed by the process." She knows exactly what she's doing, and she's doing it on purpose. As far as I'm aware, she hasn't missed a single trick in doing everything possible to throw the case in favor of Trump while retaining the tiniest fig leaf of deniability. If anything, she is masterful at corruption!
All these moderate dipshits hemming and hawing and second-guessing the intentionality of everything the fascist traitors do in some misguided compulsion to "decorum" or "norms" or "fair play," ignoring that Trump thoroughly jettisoned all of those things a decade ago, are going to eventually find themselves in front of a firing squad of redhats and be mystified as to how they got there.
This article is a very good example of why current media is terrible.
This article is a summary of someone else's work. It does not contain any news. Literally. It contains no new information, no original reporting, and adds nothing to the understanding of the situation in Florida one may glean from reading the CNN article the New Republic is ripping off. What is does is take the reporting done by CNN, which was far more even-keeled, and dresses it up in more incendiary language to outrage media consumers who want information that is consistent with what they already believe.
If you didn't read the CNN article, this is what it did:
A reporter at CNN interviewed several lawyers who had cases before Cannon. Those lawyers were asked what they thought about the judge and offered the following opinions:
She is very detail oriented
She is rigid and provincial when it comes to procedure and local rules.
She is indecisive.
She sometimes seems overwhelmed.
She focuses on abstract issues, or otherwise obsesses over elements of the case that seem irrelevant to trial lawyers rather than making decisions about factual questions.
She is not going to defer to the prosecutor automatically, even in situations where the defense and prosecutor agree.
One lawyer felt she was harsh towards defendants in general but was less harsh towards Trump in this particular case.
The CNN article suggests that a a combination of some or all of factors 1-7 have made it easy for the defense in the Trump case to gum up the works and slow the progress of the trial down.
Most of these opinions are fairly anodyne. Many of them could describe almost any federal judge. Some of them even seem like good characteristics for a federal judge. (I think it is good, for example, that a federal judge requires prosecutors to back up their assertions and motions with specificity, rather than try to justify motions with generic claims.) Whats more is that none of these opinions would be particularly surprising to anyone who has been following the news surrounding Trump's Florida trial. Nothing in the CNN reporting is particularly "damning" as the New Republic characterizes the report. The New Republic focuses on the strongest criticism of Cannon, but that criticism is the opinion of a single lawyer, and only represented a small portion of the overall report offered by CNN. If you only read the New Republic's version, you would be forgiven for thinking that was the focus of the CNN article. In that case you would have an inaccurate view of the article, which is itself mostly a summary of opinions. I will also note that, when the New Republic was copying CNN's homework, they ignored the praise defense lawyers had for Cannon. But I suppose if they had included the praise it would have been harder to call the article "damning".
To put it plainly, the New Republic article is trash. It is a summary of someone else's reporting that hypes up the most negative opinion about a federal judge, while ignoring the bulk of the same reporting.
I didn't read the CNN piece as being overly critical. I read it as saying more like "hey she's not all that bad. She's actually pretty clever, but lack of trial experience is just bogging down process. She's learning and doesn't have anyone to mentor her in her lonely courthouse"
I left reading it a bit pissed off that such a fluff piece was even published.
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