And yet, when his lawyers formally filed the papers, they chose a tiny court in the farthest northeast corner of the federal court’s largest district — a satellite location 70 miles from Mar-a-Lago. They ignored the West Palm Beach federal courthouse which is a 12 minute drive away. Trump’s legal team, it seemed, was specifically looking for a particular federal judge: one he appointed as president. The tactic backfired, and Trump got a Clinton-era judge who he immediately tried to disqualify for alleged bias. U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks called him out on a sly footnote. “I note that the Plaintiff filed this action in the Fort Pierce Division of this District, where there is only one federal judge: Judge Aileen Cannon, whom the Plaintiff appointed in 2020. Against the odds, this case ended up with me. And when the Plaintiff is a litigant before a self-appointed judge, he is not inclined to promote these same kinds of bias,” Middlebrooks wrote in April. Months later, Trump sued again in the Southern District of Florida, this time seeking to block the FBI’s investigation into how he maintained hundreds of classified records at Mar-a-Lago. Except this time, he got the Cannon. The strategy is already paying off. On Monday afternoon, Cannon single-handedly struck the most politically sensitive and consequential FBI investigation ever. Convinced by the Trump team’s legal arguments that the Justice Department’s usual methods of carefully handling seized documents aren’t good enough when investigating this particular former president, she ordered that a “special gentleman” be assigned to play referee to dictate what happens with classified documents that constitute evidence of a crime. “The investigation and treatment of a former president is of singular interest to the general public, and the country is best served by an orderly process that advances the interest and perception of justice,” she wrote in her order. As they did last month at Mar-a-Lago, the feds routinely rely on a so-called “filter team” to separate constitutionally protected communications between a suspect and his attorney from evidence that goes to actual investigators working on the criminal case. case. But Cannon ordered the appointment of a “special master” — from a list of nominees amenable to both the DOJ and Trump — to further oversee the handling of those documents. That Trump can have a say is a remarkable victory rarely granted to someone accused of crimes as serious as violations of the Espionage Act. Cannon declined to rule on whether the FBI should return Trump’s personal items — such as accounting documents, medical records and tax correspondence — even though the Justice Department has indicated that placing them next to some of the nation’s most classified secrets makes official evidence of Trump’s criminal recklessness that could be shown in a future trial. Her decision was widely criticized by former prosecutors and legal scholars on Monday for how it clumsily bolstered the idea that a former president can somehow claim “executive privilege” over government documents, even if federal law enforcement agencies they operate with the tacit approval of a sitting president acting in their capacity as a sitting executive. “This mainstream opinion special is so bad it’s hard to know where to start… its analysis of attitude is terrible. Trump wouldn’t own these documents anyway, so why is he getting them Master?’ tweeted Neal Katyal, a professor of national security law who was previously the nation’s top lawyer as the federal government’s solicitor general. Katyal also criticized how Cannon did not do what was widely seen as the right move: send Trump’s lawsuit back to U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, who approved the Mar-a-Lago search warrant and was already overseeing key elements of this issue. “He let Trump forum shop for a judge, instead of letting the judge evaluate these allegations. The appearances here are tragic,” Katyal wrote. Cannon’s order was full of innuendo, including odd jabs at the Biden administration and jabs at investigative journalists for their role in revealing exactly what Trump was doing with those classified files at Mar-a-Lago. “The Court is mindful of the arguably unprecedented nature of the search of a former President’s residence,” he wrote, citing a possible lack of “customary cooperation between former and incumbent administrations regarding the ownership and sharing of documents” and stressing “an interest in ensuring integrity of a tactical process amid swirling allegations of bias and media leaks.” He went even further, noting the importance of an independent arbitrator overseeing the handling of seized materials to ensure Trump does not suffer “irreparable injury” from “exposure either to the investigative team or to the media.” Her comments come notably at a time when investigative journalists have often led the charge to document evidence of Trump administration corruption. Cannon telegraphed much of her decision-making process during the case’s first public hearing Thursday, when she considered blocking FBI special agents from reviewing documents they already had for nearly a month — while allowing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Service to continue using them to assess the potential damage from having so many national security secrets in desk drawers and boxes at a luxury beach club. “So would your position change,” Cannon asked a reluctant federal prosecutor Thursday, “if the special master was allowed to proceed without prejudice to ODNI’s ongoing review for intelligence purposes, but to temporarily halt any use of the documents in the criminal investigation ?” According to a transcript, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence attorney, Jay I. Bratt, later summed up why it’s unfortunate to have a former president asserting executive privilege over a current president to slow down the FBI — and put some of the toughest guards of the nation Secrets are back in the hands of a former president who no longer has any authority to hold them. “We have no idea where they will be stored. again, that would mean giving people access to things they don’t have a right to access,” Bratt said, criticizing what he called “a fanciful view that somehow … they would bar the Executive Department from looking at Executive Branch material for a core function of the Executive Branch.” Her comments confused legal scholars and raised alarm at the time. “Really stupid what Judge Cannon can do here. Executive privilege doesn’t work that way,” tweeted NYU Law School professor Ryan Goodman, who runs the Just Security blog. And yet on Monday, Cannon did just that, shutting down the FBI while allowing the nation’s spy chief to continue using those seized documents to carry out her damage assessment. This isn’t the first time Trump has spun around his expired credentials and claimed what some are calling “residual executive privilege.” When he tried to block the January 6 Commission from obtaining his administration’s records at the National Archives, the argument was shot down by a federal judge who declared that “presidents are not kings and the plaintiff is not a president.” The legal argument was also categorically rejected by appellate will and the Supreme Court gave it a cold shoulder. In Cannon, the Trump team will find a conservative lawyer who has spent more than a year waiting in line for a court date and who, despite being a Hispanic foreign-born, has been unwilling to openly disagree with Trump’s racist comments about American judge of Mexican descent. Cannon was born in Cali, Colombia, in 1981, just as Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cocaine-trafficking cartel began to dominate the country, with sicario assassins killing prosecutors and forcing frightened judges to hold court behind curtains. She grew up hearing stories about how her Cuban grandmother had to flee Fidel Castro’s communist regime and how her mother had to flee the tropical island when she was just 7 years old. While attending Duke University at the turn of the century, Cannon did a brief stint as a reporter at The Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper, El Nuevo Herald, which closely covers South Florida’s overwhelmingly conservative expat community. According to government disclosure forms, he joined the Federal Society in 2005 just after starting law school. He went on to clerk with a federal appeals judge, Stephen Colloton, who is known for conservative opinions, including one that favored Christian objections to Obamacare’s mandate that forces insurance companies to cover birth control and another that supported a South Dakota law that required doctors to inform patients seeking abortions that women who have abortions are more likely to kill themselves. After a few years at the private law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in the nation’s capital, she returned to South Florida to become a federal prosecutor in 2013. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) contacted her in June 2019 to introduce her her on the federal bench. By September of that year, he was already in contact with Trump’s White House lawyers about the nomination. Senate Democrats either opposed her nomination or blocked the vote. Cannon asserted to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in writing that she had no discussion about loyalty to the President…
