Aileen Cannon
Judge Aileen Cannon has done her duty by not doing her job.
It was clear for months that the Trump-appointee was going to hold this trial after the 2024 election, or never — and preferably the second. She spent weeks considering idiotic motions and holding hearings on such thorny issues as “should the Mar-a-Lago groundskeeper who is charged with obstructing the grand jury be allowed to see the highly classified evidence his boss stole.”
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Spoiler alert: No.
But yesterday she made it official, taking the stolen documents case off the trial calendar entirely.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture—before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [Classified Informations Procedures Act] issues remaining and forthcoming—would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” she wrote.
Citing the evidentiary issues under CIPA which she herself has failed to rule on as a reason this case can’t go forward is pretty ballsy. On November 3, Judge Cannon stayed the November 15 deadline, scheduling a hearing for March 1 to argue about scheduling, and then, after the hearing, taking an additional 40 days to set a new deadline of May 9.
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As Lawfare’s Roger Parloff notes, Trump immediately turned around and asked for further delay, which put the jurist in the awkward position of having to either “reverse herself a week later with no change in circumstances” or “deny Trump something he really wants.” But of course she chose the former, taking as a figleaf Trump’s feigned indignation that the stolen government documents may have gotten shuffled around in the boxes as they were being removed by the FBI, because the order of said documents “constituted exculpatory information relating to, inter alia, the complete absence of culpable criminal intent by President Trump.”
In her most recent order, officially removing the May 20 trial date from the calendar, Judge Cannon also cited the “currently pending motions, which now consist of eight substantive pretrial motions,” “extensive defense motions to compel discovery on a host of issues spanning hundreds of pages of classified and unclassified briefing,” as well as Trump’s motion demanding to treat the entire executive branch, including the White House Counsel’s Office, as part of the prosecution team for discovery purposes.
In other words, she’s let Trump and his henchmen spam the docket with garbage motions, been totally dilatory in ruling on them, and is now allowing the defendants to reap the reward from their bad faith behavior by postponing the trial. She’s even set a hearing for June 21 on the Motion to Dismiss Indictment Based on Unlawful Appointment and Funding of Special Counsel, a throwaway argument being bruited about by Ed Meese and Stephen Calabresi in the various Trump cases, but curiously absent when it comes to David Weiss and John Durham, i.e. the special counsels they like.
Luckily, the nation’s greatest legal mind is on the case! Or she will be eventually. Unless this case gets put off until after the election, and then gets murdered in its bed on January 21, 2025.
US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.