Somehow, federal Judge Aileen Cannon is again set to preside over key court proceedings involving Donald Trump. She’s the evidently presiding judge in matters of his new criminal charges over allegations of the willful retention of protected government documents and obstruction.
Those charges were recently unveiled from the investigative team led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who took over the probe not long after the FBI conducted a raid of Trump’s southern Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. Cannon’s earlier role came after that raid. Nominated for the federal judiciary by Trump himself while he was still in office, Cannon supported the selection of a so-called special master, which was a court-appointed third party whose task was to deal with disputes over the handling of evidence taken from Mar-a-Lago in federal law enforcement’s raid. Considering the established frameworks available for handling such disputes, the special master’s selection was widely decried as what amounted to a delay tactic, and higher-level judiciary authorities eventually shut the whole thing down before that figure finalized his report.
And now, Cannon is back. Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law, is calling for Cannon to recuse — essentially meaning remove — herself from the case and argues there is a legal necessity for action because of the ostensibly objective basis on which her credibility can be questioned. “Judge Cannon’s rulings in favor of Donald Trump’s motion to suspend the criminal investigation… including her appointment of a special master to undertake a review that had no basis in law, certainly fits that test by establishing a strong basis for questioning her impartiality, entirely apart from the aggravating factor that she was appointed to her lifetime position on the federal bench by defendant Donald Trump,” Tribe told Newsweek, that publication recently reported.
He also spoke more generally of how serious the matter was of ensuring that the eventually forthcoming trial of Trump would have the essentially undeniable appearance of impartiality and overall fairness. Trump, of course, remains resolute, resisting any notion of guilt and accusing his opponents of election interference because of his 2024 campaign for president that he started after this investigation was already active and known.
