It was a year ago this month when Donald Trump’s classified documents case was assigned to, of all people, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a controversial Trump appointee. According to a striking new report from The New York Times, two of the jurist’s more experienced colleagues on the same court urged Cannon to hand the case off to someone else.
The judges who approached Judge Cannon — including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga — each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge, the two people said. But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and refused the judges’ entreaties.
Altonaga, it’s worth noting for context, is a George W. Bush appointee.
The Times’ report has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, but if it’s accurate, it’s a rare and important peek behind the curtain.
According to the Times, one judge called Cannon early on in the process, making a logistical argument for her handing off the case to a colleague: Cannon’s courthouse is a two-hour drive from the courthouse in Miami, where the grand jury was located.
When that didn’t work, the local chief judge encouraged the jurist to pass on the case for optics reasons, given a related controversy from months earlier related to Cannon and the underlying Trump investigation, which left Cannon looking incompetent and biased.
This pitch didn’t work, either.
By any fair measure, the judges who encouraged Cannon to do the responsible thing were offering sound advice. The Trump-appointed conservative really did lack the relevant experience to oversee such a case, and she really was on record leaving little doubt about her ideological pro-Trump disposition. What’s more, we now know with the benefit of hindsight that those who urged Cannon to hand the case off to someone better suited to hear it were right. The Times’ report added, “Judge Cannon has exhibited hostility to prosecutors, handled pretrial motions slowly and indefinitely postponed the trial, declining to set a date for it to begin even though both the prosecution and the defense had told her they could be ready to start this summer.” She’s also, incidentally, repeatedly given observers reason to question her competence, lent credence to questions that legal experts consider absurd, and justified procedural delays by pointing to logjams that she created. I’m reminded anew of an infamous quote attributed to Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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