Some are calling for an investigation and the impeachment by Congress of Trump-nominated federal Judge Aileen Cannon after her decision to appoint a third-party expert known as a special master for reviewing items seized in a search by the FBI of Trump’s southern Florida resort Mar-a-Lago was overturned.
That raid was connected to the ongoing criminal investigation by the Justice Department into Trump harboring classified documents after he left office. Amid that investigation, third-party searches apparently set up by the Trump team recently uncovered at least two additional classified documents at a southern Florida storage unit associated with the former president’s team, although similar third-party searches conducted of other Trump properties, including Trump Tower in New York City and Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, didn’t reveal any further classified docs in either place. Besides the end to the special master’s review taking effect, Cannon has also dismissed the underlying civil lawsuit from Trump that led to the oversight, action she took in line with the appeals panel’s demands.
The Justice Department can now freely use all of what it seized from Trump in August as part of its investigation into his handling of classified materials. “It’s great that the “special master” BS has been dismissed,” Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and current legal analyst in the media said Monday. “But the fact that Trump-appointed Judge Cannon wrongfully exercised jurisdiction, thereby “interfering” (11th Circuit’s word) in a fed investigation into Trump, thereby benefiting Trump, feels kinda … investigate-able?” Tristan Snell, an attorney who apparently was previously involved in court action against the sham educational institution called Trump University, thought similarly. “Shouldn’t the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate Judge Cannon? To ensure that she was not having any improper communications with anyone tied to Trump while she was busy interfering with truly serious criminal and national security investigations of him?” he asked online on Monday.
Notably, the three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit appeals court that directed an end to the special master’s time-consuming document review, which went over at least some questions already dealt with by the Justice Department, was comprised entirely of judges nominated by Republican presidents — including Trump. Now, there have also been calls for Cannon’s impeachment, a measure that is apparently possible but which has only led to a conviction in the Senate, as required, under a dozen times. One petition supporting the judge’s impeachment had been signed about 5,000 times by Tuesday.
“The case ends in what should be humiliation for Judge Cannon,” Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson told The Daily Beast after Cannon officially dismissed the underlying civil case. “She was resoundingly slapped down by her conservative colleagues who explained that it’s not just that she had a creative interpretation of the law. It’s that she inserted herself into a case where she didn’t belong—and essentially acted as another advocate for the former president of the United States.” Levinson added that Cannon’s “decisions just completely lacked judicial restraint. That’s way out of the bounds of what’s acceptable. And she made political decisions with no legal basis” — a characterization supported at least in broad terms by the appeals court judges who declined to create a standard by which subjects of an investigation could act to so dramatically impede federal action.
