The Times said that neither of its two sources identified the second federal judge in Florida who had reached out to Cannon
It’s quite unusual to see such leaks regarding the federal judiciary. The timing of the story is also noteworthy because Cannon has scheduled a series of hearings beginning Friday on legal motions by Trump and his co-defendants to dismiss the classified documents case.
Cannon has yet to set a trial date for the 37-count indictment related to Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left the White House. Prosecutors have said Trump repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information, including U.S. nuclear secrets. Trump is also accused of taking steps to obstruct the government’s efforts to get the documents back. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Legal experts have raised questions over whether her decisions are simply a product of inexperience or in some instances show outright favoritism towards Trump -- who appointed Cannon to the bench in 2020.
Judge Cannon, for example, has set aside all of Friday for a hearing on Trump’s motion arguing that Smith’s appointment was unlawful – an issue other courts have largely rejected.
On Monday, Cannon will kick off her court schedule with another hearing related to Smith’s appointment – a motion brought by Trump challenging the funding of the special counsel’s office. The same day, Cannon will hear arguments over Smith’s request for a gag order limiting Trump’s rhetoric about law enforcement involved in the search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
Next Tuesday, she is scheduled to consider Trump’s request to throw out evidence gathered during that search as well as testimony provided by Evan Corcoran, his former lead attorney who Smith has alleged Trump misled as part of his efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation.
Cannon’s ruling on these motions could finally give Smith grounds to ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to recuse her from the case.
The Times report noted that lawyers who practice in the Southern District of Florida say Cannon has broken with a general practice of judges there to delegate some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge. In this case the magistrate judge would have been
Judge Bruce E. Reinhart who signed off on the FBI warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in August 2022.
After FBI agents found thousands of government files that Trump should have turned over to the National Archives when he left office — including more than 100 marked as classified, Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that the seized material was his personal property and asking for a special master to be appointed to look through the documents.
Instead of letting Reinhart handle the lawsuit, Cannon chose to rule on the motion. Her decision to bar federal investigators from gaining access to the evidence and appointing a special master to make recommendations to her stunned legal experts who felt that she was granting a special exception for Trump.
In September 2022, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta repudiated Cannon by
reversing her order to appoint a special master and ruled that she lacked the legal authority to intervene in the first place.
In June 2023, a grand jury in Miami indicted Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The case was randomly assigned to Cannon,
One of The Times” sources said an unnamed judge first urged Cannon to step aside because the courthouse in Fort Pierce, where she is the sole district court judge, lacked a secure facility approved to hold highly classified documents. The federal courthouse in Miami does have such a secure facility. Because Cannon kept the case, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (S.C.I.F.) eventually had to be built in the Fort Pierce courthouse.
The source told The Times that Altonaga, the district’s chief judge, then placed a call to Cannon urging her to step aside..