Judge Cannon’s Duty

What Judge Aileen Cannon lacks in experience she is making up for in gumption — and wisdom. In 2020, the jurist was named to the bench by President Trump. Last year she was assigned by lottery stewardship of his Mar-a-Lago case over how he handled classified documents. Now comes the Times to report that “two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to pass it up and hand it off to another jurist.”The Times would have its hard-pressed readers believe that the reason is that Judge Cannon “wanted to keep the case.” Our guess is that she just had a more mature sense of duty than the judges who feared she was too pro-Trump. Efforts to jawbone Judge Cannon off the Trump case — the Times allows that such pressure by judicial colleagues is “extraordinary” — appear to only have strengthened her resolve.The Times is full of beans on the issue. “Prepared, Prickly and Slow” is how the Grey Lady describes her in a recent headline. “Defensive,” too, the Times says of her “decision-making skills and judicial temperament.” The jurist is dismissed as “an industrious but inexperienced and often insecure judge” who is allowing “one of the country’s most important criminal cases to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues.”The Gray Lady’s latest dispatch comes one day before Judge Cannon will hear oral arguments over whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was crosswise with the Constitution. Another challenge, based on the Appropriations Clause, is upcoming. Reasonable minds can disagree on the challenges to Mr. Smith’s appointment, but it would be hard to suggest that those challenges are frivolous.On the contrary, they are being levied or backed by some of the keenest legal minds in the nation — Attorneys General Meese and Mukasey and an array of topnotch legal scholars. It could be, as the Times has it, that Judge Cannon’s critics consider her “in over her head, in the tank for Mr. Trump — or both.” It would, though, be hard to argue from her conduct of this case that she is a prosecutorial rubber stamp. We’ve never understood why — other than politics — Mr. Smith has been in such an all-fired rush to try Trump before the 2024 election. His professed need for speed is a political rather than a legal imperative. The right to a speedy trial, these columns have noted, is marked in the Constitution itself as to be enjoyed solely by the “accused.” Just last month, the Times dinged Judge Cannon for “granting a serious hearing to almost every issue.”Word is that Judge Cannon was pressured by the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia Altonaga. She’s been a fine judge, in our view. She erred, though, in suggesting that it would be “bad optics for Judge Cannon to oversee the trial” because she had, in an earlier phase of the case, been overruled by riders of the 11th Circuit. That’s not disqualifying, though. Judges are often reversed, during and after trial. It’s shocking to see such leaks from a federal court. In some ways, they’re more shocking than the leak of the court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade. The pressure arrayed at Judge Cannon rhymes with the push to force Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves in the January 6 cases. Chief Justice Roberts, unlike Judge Altonga, has defended the duties and prerogatives of his colleagues. We hope the lower courts are watching.

Judge Cannon’s Duty

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