As attention on former President Donald Trump’s federal criminal case dealing with his handling of classified documents continues, a retired judge from New York is saying that the presiding federal judge in the case — Trump nominee Aileen Cannon — is falling short on “the first thing you always do as a judge.”

“Well, I’m loathed to call her biased. I don’t know the woman at all. But let’s just look at it from a legal aspect, okay? The first thing you always do as a judge is you make sure you have a trial date set. She doesn’t even have a trial date. That invites nothing happening, if you will. Whether she’s doing this because she’s inexperienced, whether she’s doing this because she’s not confident in her decisions, whether she’s purposely slow walking it, who knows? The result, however, is absolutely nothing is happening here, and it’s subjecting her to a lot of very valid criticism,” said retired New York judge Diane Kiesel on CNN.

This week, Cannon kicked off proceedings that were set to work through legal challenges to the prosecutor behind Trump’s case — Special Counsel Jack Smith — holding that role at all. The latest round of proceedings, with no trial yet in sight, were set to also deal with a push from Smith for new restrictions on Trump’s public comments after the spread of rhetoric widely decried as deceptive connected to a raid in 2022 on Trump’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago.

In short, the Trump campaign and others claimed that federal authorities harbored some kind of ambition of assassinating the ex-president around the time of carrying out that raid. Actually at issue was what details indicate was a routine and limiting allowance for the use of deadly force in the course of executing the warrant that didn’t relate to Trump personally.