Aileen Cannon Suspending Trump Case Leaves Legal Experts ‘Disgusted’

Legal analysts are accusing Judge Aileen Cannon of pro-Donald Trump bias after indefinitely suspending his classified documents case.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, indefinitely postponed the trial on Tuesday, citing legal disputes around classified evidence. Cannon said there were eight outstanding substantive pending motions for her to rule on and predicted this will take until at least late July.

It is unknown whether the case will begin before the November 2024 presidential election. If elected, Trump has a number of options to kill the trial, including pardoning himself or appointing a favorable attorney general to drop the charges.

Cannon is overseeing the case in which the former president is accused of illegally retaining classified documents, hoarding them at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and obstructing attempts by federal officials to retrieve them.

Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. He has denied any wrongdoing in the case and has said the documents he retained were personal.

Newsweek sought email comment from Trump’s attorney and Cannon’s office on Wednesday.

Attorney Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told Newsweek that he is disgusted by Cannon’s decision.

“I’m not surprised, but I am disgusted,” he said. “Whether she’s doing it out of partiality for the former president or is just a lousy jurist, this latest blunder by Judge Cannon takes the cake.

“This case should have been tried to a verdict already and would have been if any normal judge had gotten it.”

Attorney Neama Rahmani told Newsweek that he was also not surprised by Cannon’s actions.

“Judge Cannon has ruled in Trump’s favor at almost every possible turn, so I’m not surprised that she delayed the trial indefinitely,” he said. “She is inexperienced and seems in over her head. She’s made a number of bizarre rulings that aren’t supported by logic or the law and she has already been overturned by the Eleventh Circuit multiple times.”

Rahmani, president of the West Coast Trial Lawyers law firm in California, said that delays benefit the former president, “especially in the middle of another trial and the presidential campaign.”

He said Cannon’s ruling “is yet another win for Trump in south Florida.”

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers told Newsweek that Cannon was never going to put Trump on trial before election day.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “You don’t have to be a mind reader to predict that a trial before Election Day was never going to happen. Her slow pretrial pace made it rather clear that she was in no hurry to bring the case to trial.”