The Republican campaign to discredit federal prosecutors skims over the substance of those charges, which were brought by a grand jury in Florida. GOP lawmakers are instead working, as they have for several years, to foster a broader argument that law enforcement — and President Joe Biden — are conspiring against the former president and possible Republican nominee for president in 2024.
“Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, soon after Trump said on his social media platform Thursday night that an indictment was coming. McCarthy blamed Biden, who has declined to comment on the case and said he is not at all involved in the Justice Department’s decisions.
McCarthy called it a “grave injustice” and said that House Republicans “will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
Republican lawmakers in the House have already laid extensive groundwork for the effort to defend Trump since taking the majority in January. A near constant string of hearings featuring former FBI agents, Twitter executives and federal officials have sought to paint the narrative of a corrupt government using its powers against Trump and the right. A GOP-led House subcommittee on the “weaponization” of government is probing the Justice Department and other government agencies, while at the same time Republicans are investigating Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“It’s a sad day for America,” said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chairman who is a leading Trump defender and ally, in a statement Thursday. “God bless President Trump.”
Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs was more strident. “We have now reached a war phase,” he tweeted. “Eye for an eye.”
Democrats say the Republicans are trafficking in conspiracy theories, with potentially dangerous consequences. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both Democrats from New York, issued a joint statement Friday urging calm around the Trump case, saying everyone should “let this case proceed peacefully in court.”
The criminal case against President Donald J. Trump over his hoarding of classified documents was randomly assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a court official for the Southern District of Florida said on Saturday.
The chief clerk of the federal court system there, Angela E. Noble, also confirmed that Judge Cannon would continue to oversee the case unless she recused herself.
The news of Judge Cannon’s assignment raised eyebrows because of her role in an earlier lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump challenging the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago. In issuing a series of rulings favorable to him, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, effectively disrupted the investigation until a conservative appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.
Under the district court’s procedures, new cases are randomly delegated to a judge who sits in the division where the matter arose or a neighboring one, even if it relates to a previous case. That Judge Cannon is handling Mr. Trump’s criminal indictment elicited the question of how that had come to be.
Asked over email whether normal procedures were followed and Judge Cannon’s assignment was random, Ms. Noble wrote: “Normal procedures were followed.”
Cannon, a Trump appointee, gained notoriety while presiding over Trump’s attempt to halt the classified documents investigation in 2022. Following the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lawyers filed a complaint alleging that the search was illegitimate and unconstitutional; they demanded the appointment of a special master and, in the meantime, a freeze on prosecutors’ review of seized materials. In a calculated act of judge shopping, the case was assigned to Cannon, who leaped at the opportunity to prove her fidelity to the man who’d appointed her and, perhaps, audition for a future Supreme Court seat. Trump’s lawsuit amounted to pure gibberish, a glorified Truth Social post that alleged a Democratic conspiracy. So Cannon promptly encouraged his lawyers to rewrite the suit so it sounded marginally less asinine. She then issued an order prohibiting the government from “further review and use of any of the materials” seized from Mar-a-Lago “for criminal investigative purposes.”
This command marked the first time in the history of the republic that a federal judge had claimed the power to stop a pre-indictment criminal investigation into a suspect. Cannon’s overreach provoked genuine shock in legal circles and fear in the intelligence community, as it effectively blocked officials from assessing the seized documents for national security risks. (Her order reflected a profound misunderstanding of national security damage assessments.) A right-leaning panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit—which included two Trump appointees—soon stayed this portion of her decision, highlighting its “chilling” effect on fundamental “national-security duties.”
But Cannon wasn’t finished. She agreed to Trump’s request for a special master and appointed Raymond Dearie, a well-respected federal judge. After Dearie tried to bring some discipline to the case, though, Cannon immediately ran interference for Trump. She overruled an order that would’ve required the former president to either disavow or stand by previous claims that FBI agents planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago. She spared him the burden of lodging specific objections to the review of individual documents, which would have revealed the bogus nature of his claim to executive privilege. And she extended deadlines to help Trump drag out the special master’s review for as long as possible.
The madness finally ended when a panel of the 11th Circuit—made up of two Trump appointees and the ultraconservative William Pryor—ruled that Cannon had no authority to hear Trump’s lawsuit in the first place, rendering every one of her orders null and void. It was one of the most humiliating appellate smackdowns in recent history, a total demolition of literally every action that Cannon had taken from the outset of the case. The 11th Circuit accused Cannon of attempting “a radical reordering of our caselaw” that violated “bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.” And it directed her to relinquish control over the case.
Now fast-forward to today. Cannon has been assigned to handle at least the initial phases of Trump’s federal indictment in Florida. Her name appeared on the summons sent to the former president, as did Bruce Reinhart’s, the magistrate judge who signed off on the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. (Magistrate judges may conduct preliminary proceedings in a criminal case, like authorizing a warrant, but it’s unlikely that Reinhart will play a major role here.) Typically, federal district court judges are assigned cases randomly, though the court may transfer a case to a specific judge who has prior experience with the matter. So, perhaps Cannon’s (calamitous) oversight of the Mar-a-Lago search dispute gave her dibs on this indictment. Cases are also reassigned based on workload to ensure that there’s a roughly even distribution among active judges. All of this means that we don’t really know why Cannon was initially assigned the case, and we don’t know if she will keep it. We can be fairly confident, though, based on her history, that she will do everything in her power to keep it to protect her benefactor, who is clearly in immense legal danger from this case.
Smith, for his part, has the option of requesting a different judge; 11th Circuit precedent allows reassignment when the presiding judge appears unable to put “previous views and findings aside.” (This is a nice way of saying that they’re in the tank for the defendant.) Trump would surely fight such a request, and it’s impossible to say where the 11th Circuit would come down.
Imagine, though, that Cannon does preside over this case. She has infinite tools at her disposal to thwart the prosecution at nearly every turn. Big swings, like tossing out the whole case—a very real possibility in her courtroom of chaos—can be appealed and overturned. But at every step, there are opportunities for sabotage. Cannon can try to rig voir dire to help the defense stack the jury with Trump supporters. She can exclude evidence and testimony that’s especially damning to Trump. She can disqualify witnesses who are favorable to the prosecution. She can sustain the defense’s frivolous objections and overrule the prosecution’s meritorious ones. She can direct a verdict of acquittal to render the jury superfluous. She can declare a mistrial prematurely for any number of reasons, including lengthy juror deliberations, and stretch out various deadlines to run out the clock. Many of these procedural moves could not be appealed until the proceedings have drawn to a close; appeals courts do not referee every little dispute in a jury trial as they happen. Cannon will be in control.
So no, I don't expect this case to go anywhere now anytime soon. At the very least, the trial, if it happens at all, won't start before 2025, and if Trump wins, it gets dismissed as moot.
That leaves us with the January 6th investigation, and Fani Willis in Georgia.
We'll see where this is going, but as astonishing as the last 48 hours have been, this case may already be over...
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