Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling to start the Trump documents trial in May 2024 showed, for now, that she is the jurist defenders have described: level-headed and not beholden to the man who appointed her.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a previously obscure Trump judicial appointee, has been viewed with incredulity by much of the legal establishment ever since she issued a ruling temporarily halting the federal investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents. After a conservative appeals court slapped her down, Democrats said she was either incompetent or some kind of black-robed Trojan horse for the MAGA movement.
On Friday morning, that view began to change.
In a ruling that set a start date for the documents trial on May 20, 2024 — splitting the difference between prosecutors who wanted the trial to begin in December and a Trump team that pushed for a date after next year’s election — Judge Cannon showed, for now, that she is the jurist her defenders have described: a level-headed and mostly ordinary conservative judge not beholden to the man who appointed her.
“The notion that she’s inexperienced is misplaced and ignores her exceptional résumé before taking the bench,” said Jesse Panuccio, a prominent Florida defense lawyer who served in the Trump administration as acting associate attorney general. “It also penalizes her for being a mild-mannered woman. They wouldn’t be saying this if she was a big-personality male.”
There were hints of that jurist earlier in the week when Judge Cannon conducted a brisk pretrial conference at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., to hear arguments about the timing of the trial. Over two hours, she left little doubt as to whose courtroom it was.
“That’s not my question,” she snapped at one of the lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump for offering a rambling rejoinder to one of her queries. Attentive to the point of reminding each side what the other had said earlier, she frequently pushed for more specifics, asking the Trump team at one point, “Can you put more meat on the bones to that?” At another moment she asked the Trump side to “articulate precisely” the “novel questions” they had said should delay the trial.
Judge Cannon appeared sympathetic to the Trump team’s argument that the classified documents presented complex issues that might require more preparation time, but she also nodded when prosecutors argued that Mr. Trump should not be treated differently from any other citizen.
Most of all, Judge Cannon made clear her preference that the trial be put on the docket sooner rather than later. “I don’t want to have delays,” she warned the defense team, then concluded by promising to issue a ruling “promptly.” Less than 72 hours later, she set the May trial date, which falls two months before the Republican National Convention, when Mr. Trump, the current Republican front-runner, could be at the start of a general election campaign.
The scrutiny is hardly over for Judge Cannon’s conduct overseeing the most consequential trial in at least a generation, one in which prosecutors have charged a former president with federal crimes related to the illegal retention of classified documents. But at this point some veterans of the federal bar say that the Democratic hand-wringing over Judge Cannon’s initial ruling, soundly rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, will prove to be unwarranted.
“Especially given that Judge Cannon is relatively new to the federal bench, I fully expect that she was chastened by the 11th Circuit’s reversal,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Several in the Florida legal community who know Judge Cannon have taken exception to assertions that she is a dunce, a Trump stealth warrior or both.
One of them, a veteran federal prosecutor, suggested that Judge Cannon was merely being “hyper-cautious” in appointing a special master to review the documents at issue in the Trump case. Another, a longtime defense attorney in the state, insisted that Judge Cannon would have issued the same ruling had the former president been a Democrat.
A close inspection of Judge Cannon’s trajectory, including interviews with friends, former classmates and colleagues, reveals a diligent conservative achiever who seemed destined for success but perhaps ill-equipped for the notoriety that has now overtaken her.
“There are some judges who might see the Trump case as a way to make their name,” Mr. Panuccio said. “Knowing her, I can’t imagine her saying, ‘I hope the assignment wheel turns it to me.
