Ty Cobb, formerly a White House lawyer in the Trump administration, argued in a recent interview that alleged appearances of partiality towards the former president from Judge Aileen Cannon as she handles a criminal case of his “should disqualify her.”
The federal case accuses the ex-president of the mishandling of government records, a collection of which were recovered from Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. Cannon, originally nominated to the federal judiciary by Trump himself when he was still in office, has faced accusations of bias for the former president throughout her involvement in various Trump proceedings. Among the most recent points of contention is her insistence in arguments about jury instructions for the eventual trial on keeping alive — for now — an argument of the federal Presidential Records Act (PRA) potentially helping Trump out legally.
“I think the evidence is just too overwhelming. I mean, yes, she may be incompetent, but at this stage of the game, you know, her incompetence is so gross that I think it clearly creates the perception of partiality and her attempt to put her thumb on the scale. So I think that should disqualify her,” Cobb argued on CNN.
The lawyer said in the same interview that he believed it was “likely” the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals would remove Cannon from the case entirely in certain circumstances specifically involving her continued failure to decisively rule on that PRA question followed by Special Counsel Jack Smith seeking the higher-level court’s intervention. Cannon rejected this week an argument from Trump to entirely dismiss the indictment on PRA grounds, but she also rebuffed Smith’s push to put the argument to rest in the jury instructions context.
“I think, you know, the filing today makes it plain that she has to rule,” Cobb told CNN. “And if she doesn’t rule under either scenario, they’ll be in a position to take her up to the 11th Circuit. And I think the 11th Circuit will likely take her off the case.”
