Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee the case of secret documents of former President Donald J. Trump, two other experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida asked her to give up and hand over to other legal experts, according to. to the two people mentioned in the conversation.
The judges who approached Judge Cannon – including the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga – each asked him to consider whether it would be better if he dismissed the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another. judge, both of them said.
But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and rejected the judge’s request. His job raised eyebrows because he had little trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Mr. Trump by intervening in a way that helped him in a criminal investigation that led to an indictment, only to be overturned by a very critical rebuke from conservatives. appellate court panel.
The extraordinary and previously undisclosed effort by Judge Cannon’s colleagues to persuade him to step down added another dimension to increasing criticism of how he handled the case.
He has broken, according to lawyers who operate there, with the general practice of federal judges in the Southern District of Florida delegating some pretrial motions to judges – in this instance, Judge Bruce E. Reinhart. While he was a subordinate, Judge Reinhart was an older and more experienced jurist. In 2022, he was the man who signed an FBI warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida club and home, for highly sensitive government files that Mr. Trump kept after leaving office.
Since then, Judge Cannon has shown hostility to the prosecution, handling pretrial motions slowly and indefinitely adjourning the trial, refusing to set a date to start even though both the prosecution and the defense have told him they can be ready to start this summer.
But Mr. Trump’s lawyers also urged him to delay any trial until after the election, and his handling of the case almost ensured that he would succeed in that strategy. If Mr. Trump recaptures the White House, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case.
As Judge Cannon’s handling of the case has come under intensifying scrutiny, his critics have suggested that he may be in over his head, in the tank for Mr. Trump – or both.
Against that backdrop, word of the initial efforts of his colleagues on the bench to persuade him to step down — and the significance of his decision not to do so — has spread among other federal judges and people in the know.
Neither Judge Cannon nor Judge Altonaga immediately responded to requests for comment, including by email sent through the clerk of the district court, Angela E. Noble. Mrs. Noble later wrote in an email: “Our judge does not comment on pending cases.”
It is routine for novice judges to seek out more experienced legal professionals for advice or informal guidance as they learn to perform their new roles. And as district chief, Judge Altonaga has an official role in the administration of federal courts in South Florida.
Ultimately, however, Judge Cannon did not submit to the authority of the district court elders. Like judges confirmed by the Senate, who are appointed by the president, they have life tenure and independent tenure and are free to choose to ignore the advice.
Two people who discussed efforts to persuade him to give up the case spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Each has been addressed by a different federal judge in the Southern District of Florida, including Judge Altonaga.
No one has named a second federal judge in Florida as far as Judge Cannon. One person confirmed efforts to persuade Judge Cannon to step aside but did not elaborate on the two judges’ conversations with him. Others provided more details.
This person said that every outreach is done by phone. The first judge to call Judge Cannon, this person said, suggested that the case would be better handled by a jurist closer to the district’s busiest courthouse in Miami, where the grand jury indicting Mr. Trump sits. .
At the time, the Miami courthouse also had a secure facility approved to hold classified information that would be discussed in pre-trial motions and used as evidence in the case. Judge Cannon is the sole judge in the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, two hours north of Miami. The courthouse in Fort Pierce did not have a secure facility when the case was assigned.
Because Judge Cannon kept the case, taxpayers will have to pay to build a secure room — known as a Sensitive Compartment Information Facility, or SCIF — there.
After those initial arguments failed to sway Judge Cannon to step aside, the person said, Judge Altonaga called.
The chief judge – who was appointed by the former President George W. Bush – said he had made a more pointed argument: It would be bad optics for Judge Cannon to oversee the trial because of what happened during the criminal investigation that led to Mr. Trump’s indictment on charges of illegally withholding national security documents after leaving office and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
In August 2022, the FBI obtained a search warrant from Judge Reinhart to go to Mar-a-Lago to hunt for classified documents that Mr. Trump still does not serve after receiving a subpoena for him.
The agents found thousands of government files kept by Mr. Trump, even though under the Presidential Records Act, they must go to the National Archives when he leaves office. The files recovered by the FBI include more than 100 marked as classified, including some at the most restricted level.
Shortly after the search, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit against the government protesting the seizure of the material, which he claimed was his personal property, and asked for a special master to be appointed to sift through it. Rather than let Judge Reinhart handle the lawsuit, as would have been normal procedure, Judge Cannon chose to decide the matter.
A formidable legal expert on ideological lines, he prevented investigators from gaining access to evidence and appointing a special master, although he said he would only make recommendations and would make the final decision.
Judge Cannon’s decision was unusual in that he intervened before any charges were filed — treating Mr. Trump as different from the typical target of search warrants based on the special status he considers the former president.
He also directed the special master to consider whether some of the seized files should be permanently kept from investigators​​​​under executive privilege, an idea that is generally dubious because it has never been successfully created in a criminal case.
Prosecutors appealed to the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta. In the rejection, a three-judge panel that included two Trump appointees reversed his order and ruled that he never had the legal authority to intervene.
“It is extraordinary that a warrant would be executed at the former president’s home — but not in a way that affects legal analysis or gives the court license to interfere with an ongoing investigation,” the panel wrote.
Limits on when courts can interfere with criminal investigations “apply regardless of who the government is investigating,” he added. “To make a special exception here would contradict the country’s fundamental principle that our laws apply ‘to all, regardless of number, wealth or rank.'”
Mr. Trump’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, but they refused to hear the case. In December 2022, Judge Cannon dismissed Mr. Trump’s claim.
Six months later, a grand jury in Miami indicted Mr. Trump, stating in detail how he kept very sensitive documents in the bathroom and on the stage at Mar-a-Lago and constantly led his assistants and lawyers to prevent efforts by the Justice. Department and National Archives to recover.
In the district’s standard practice, according to the clerk, new cases enter the system to be randomly assigned to one of the judges whose chambers are in the West Palm Beach division, which includes Mar-a-Lago, or in one of two adjacent divisions, Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale.
It goes to Judge Cannon.