Aileen Cannon’s suspension from Trump case sparks ‘disgust’ from legal experts

Legal analysts are accusing Judge Aileen Cannon of bias against Donald Trump after she indefinitely stayed the case involving his classified documents.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, postponed the trial indefinitely on Tuesday, citing litigation related to classified evidence. Cannon said there are still eight outstanding substantive applications she needs to decide on and expects that to take until at least the end of July.

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

Cannon is overseeing the case in which the former president is accused of illegally storing 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 nominee for the 2024 presidential election, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. He has denied any wrongdoing in the case and said the documents he retained were personal.

Newsweek sought emailed comment from Trump’s lawyer and Cannon’s office on Wednesday.

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

“I’m not surprised, but I’m disgusted,” he said. “Whether she’s doing it out of partisanship for the former president or is just a lousy lawyer, this latest mistake by Judge Cannon is what matters.

“This case should have already reached a verdict, and that would have been the case if a normal judge had made the verdict.”

Lawyer Neama Rahmani told Newsweek that he wasn’t surprised by Cannon’s actions either.

“Judge Cannon has almost always ruled in Trump’s favor, so I’m not surprised she postponed the trial indefinitely,” he said. “She is inexperienced and seems overwhelmed. She has made a series of bizarre decisions that are unsupported by logic or the law, and she has been overturned by the Eleventh Circuit several times.”

Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers in California, said delays benefit the former president, “particularly in the midst of another trial and the presidential campaign.”

He said Cannon’s decision was “another victory for Trump in South Florida.”

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said Newsweek that Cannon would never 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 there would never be a trial before Election Day. Her slow pretrial made it quite clear that she was in no hurry to take the case to trial.”