The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified-documents trial has faced renewed calls to recuse herself from the case after she reprimanded Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team for a word count on their legal filings.
Judge Aileen Cannon was appointed to the bench in 2018 by the former president. She has been criticized by legal experts for her response to federal prosecutors urging her not to be “manipulated” by Trump into delaying the federal trial, which is set to begin in May 2024. The frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges in connection to the classified documents case and has repeatedly called the trial a political witch hunt.
Legal experts have told Newsweek that they doubt Cannon will be removed or recuse herself from the trial this far into the proceedings.
Trump appointed her. Idk why she gets a say in anything regarding his case. It seems there’s still no adults handling this child.
Trump is getting his delay one way or another. Cannon is so deep in his pocket that even in her worse-case scenario, her recusal or removal, would start everything over at 0.
The judge that he put into a local district in his lame duck period? Surely legal proceedings wouldn’t let that judge rule on his case, the person that gave her a lifelong judge position. Nah…
I think Special Counsel is playing the long game with that inexperienced hack.
Jack Smith does not want to remove Cannon. Or he shouldn’t at least. Not at this point, anyway.
By far, the best possible outcome is still for Jack Smith to convict Donald Trump in Aileen Cannon’s Florida courtroom. As long as Cannon doesn’t start conducting the trial in a way that actually prevents Smith from winning that conviction, keeping her in place is in everybody’s best interest.
This morning’s (11/07/'23) headlines are all about how Trump verbally attacked the judge in his fraud trial in New York yesterday. Trump has repeatedly accused Judge Engoron of being partisan and biased, to the press and now in his sworn testimony. MAGA eats that shit up. The more Trump looks like a victim to them, the more riled up they get in his defense.
It seems to me that “The Case of the Stolen Nuclear Secrets” is going to be much simpler and easier for people to understand than “The Case of Strategically Shifting the Valuation of Heavily Leveraged Real Estate Properties for Various Tax and Loan Purposes.” Considering even just the evidence that has already been made public in this case (photos of boxes of classified documents haphazardly stacked in a spare bathroom; audio recordings of Trump bragging that he shouldn’t be sharing a classified brief he’d illegally kept) the chances of a conviction are strong.
If Trump gets convicted by a jury in a Florida courtroom run by so seemingly biased a judge as Cannon, it’s going to be a lot harder for him to claim it’s all rigged against him by the Democrats. It’s going to be a whole lot harder to work that conviction into the whole victimhood narrative that Trump is currently thriving on.
The opinions of the public matter much less than getting an unbiased trial, do they not?
If Trump gets out of his crimes because of a biased judge, what does the opinion of the uninformed masses matter?
As long as Cannon doesn’t start conducting the trial in a way that actually prevents Smith from winning that conviction, keeping her in place is in everybody’s best interest.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified-documents trial has faced renewed calls to recuse herself from the case after she reprimanded Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team for a word count on their legal filings.
The frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges in connection to the classified documents case and has repeatedly called the trial a political witch hunt.
Stephen E. Smith, legal professor at Santa Clara University in California, added that the chances of the Department of Justice seeking Cannon’s removal is “unlikely to the point of wholly unlikely.”
Cannon said in a recent hearing that she was open to moving the classified documents trial as the timing of the other criminal investigations involving Trump may complicate the current schedule.
There was also the added complexity of establishing secure rooms in which both prosecutors and defense lawyers can review the highly sensitive documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
In response, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman posted on X: "Biased or not, Cannon simply doesn’t have game; and she masks it with prickly remonstrations of the government.
The original article contains 939 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If Jack Smith wanted to get rid of her, he knows how to do it.
I didn’t realize a prosecutor could just get the judge changed by asking. Apparently in the US when you get a lifelong position you’re assumed to be squeeky clean and will rule without prejudice. Mean yes if it’s obvious but we see how well Cannon has been working for Trump.
Delay? Oh why not, let’s make it four, four what? Just fill in the time period defense attorney and we’ll resume then. Objection? Let’s hold today’s proceedings in case I missed a reason why I can dismiss the case. She’s just skirting her duties to make sure it doesn’t look worse than it can to try and keep her job. Yes that’s a hyperbole but she may as well just tell the defense what she needs to hear to rule in her favour.
All Smith has to do is go to a superior court and make a case for bias. Then she’ll be removed and another judge will be assigned. He doesn’t, for what reason I do not know. But, I trust him to bring it home.
I’m sure she is biased, but judges don’t recuse or get removed for this kind of thing. Judges are allowed to criticize prosecutors.
It’s the same as the criticism of the judge telling Trump’s lawyers to control him and make him answer questions in the fraud case today. It’s just part of what judges do. The other judges who would do the removing know that better than most.
judges get to criticize people, sure. But “your briefs are too long” are not one of them. Unless they legitimately are word salad with no substance.
Cannon doesn’t get to “TL/DR” and Smith’s team is very unlikely to do the word salad thing. That’s more of Trump’s specialty.
Actually, she does. Regardless of her motives, I seriously doubt that asking the prosecution to keep their briefs…brief…would be considered grounds for recusal. Same with setting her own schedule for the trial, even if that schedule is ridiculously delayed and clearly favors Trump.
And I’m not saying this in her defense. She should be removed. The problem is that she’s going the “death by a thousand paper cuts” route, and doing nothing that would be considered technically appealable. She may be flouting the rules, but she’s staying within them, even if only by millimeters.
