You knew that, of course. She’s managed to delay the stolen classified documents trial so long that it’s almost impossible for it to be tried before the election. It’s obvious that she has a bias for the defense, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise since Trump appointed her and many of the judges he appointed were highly partisan and chosen for that reason. She’s also extremely inexperienced and possibly a little bit weird on top of it.
CNN took an in depth look at her work and it’s very interesting:
Several attorneys who have practiced in front of Cannon – and who spoke to CNN for this story – pointed to her isolation as one explanation for her conduct. Cannon’s solitary post in the Fort Pierce courthouse, one that rarely sees high-profile action, deprives her of the informal, day-to-day interactions with more seasoned judges who sit at the other courthouses and could offer her advice, the lawyers told CNN.
They also said Cannon’s lack of trial experience, both as a lawyer and a judge, is apparent. In her seven years as a Justice Department attorney, Cannon participated on the trial teams of just four criminal cases. And on the bench, she’s only presided over a handful of criminal trials – and Huck took over one of them.
[…]
The attorneys described Cannon as extremely diligent and well prepared, a tough questioner who accepts nothing at face value, and thoughtful in her rulings. But they also said that some of her habits that have raised eyebrows in Trump’s case have plagued her approach from the bench more generally. Those tendencies include a penchant for letting irrelevant legal questions distract from core issues, a zero-tolerance approach to any technical defects in filings, and a struggle with docket management that allows the type of pretrial disputes that other judges would decide in weeks go unresolved for months.
“She is not efficient,” said one attorney who practices in south Florida. “She is very form over substance.” Another attorney described her as “indecisive.” A third attorney who’s had cases before Cannon said, “She just seems overwhelmed by the process.”
Five months after Huck visited Cannon in Fort Pierce, she was thrust into the center of back-to-back legal hurricanes. First, she oversaw the lawsuit Trump brought challenging the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence that August, when agents found hundreds of classified documents scattered about the property. (Cannon granted Trump’s request for a third-party review of the search, only to see her rulings reversed by a conservative appeals court.) Then, in a twist of fate last June, Cannon was assigned the criminal case in which Trump is charged with 40 felony counts of allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s attempts to find them.
The high-profile national security case is a dramatic departure from most of the other criminal cases playing out in Cannon’s courtroom, the bulk of which are more mundane prosecutions like gun charges or immigration infractions that are often resolved through guilty pleas, a CNN review of her case log showed.
Cannon’s assignment to the documents case was a game of odds. Though the charges were filed in West Palm Beach, the division that is home to Mar-a-Lago, Cannon was randomly chosen from a broader pool of judges in Florida’s southern district.
Her approach as a jurist – detail-obsessed to the point of tedious – appears uniquely prone to being exploited by a defense team eager to delay the case. And the complicated system Cannon has set up for redacting public filings has only exacerbated a backlog of unresolved issues. She still has not decided foundational questions that will determine whether the Trump case will go to trial. Marginal issues clutter her docket, including a longshot motion to invalidate Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel that she’s scheduled a hearing on later this month.
Some attorneys who have practiced before Cannon chalked up her struggle handling the practical logistics of being a trial court judge to her background of mostly appellate work for the local US Attorney’s office. They described her as latching onto abstract, academic questions at the expense of the type of on-the-fly decision-making required by trial judges that keeps litigation moving along.
As Cannon slowly plods through the backlog of issues on her plate, special counsel prosecutors are now learning firsthand the wrath that they can incur from the judge for seemingly minor discrepancies in their filings, and they have drawn Cannon’s ire for pushing her to move more quickly to resolve the substantive pretrial issues that have slowed the pace of the case to a crawl. “You can’t really take issue with her, otherwise it’s going to work against you,” a fourth attorney who has practiced before Cannon said.
Trump’s attorneys have also attracted heat from Cannon, though far less often than the special counsel.
Defense attorneys CNN spoke to described Cannon as a judge who gives minimal deference to defendants and as a “notoriously” tough sentencer. To that end, the long leash she’s given the Trump team in the pretrial phase of the case has struck a chord with them.“She’s certainly not sympathetic to most defendants, and she’s certainly playing a different game with the current defendant before her,” another lawyer told CNN, in reference to Trump.
Read the whole thing. Considering the way the right wing has packed the federal courts with extremists and hacks, I think Occam’s Razor suggests she’s just a MAGA shill. How would the results of her decisions be any different?
But it’s also possible that she’s inexperienced and isolated and doesn’t have a clue. After all, that’s how Trump runs the government, why should it be the same for MAGA acolytes? The sad fact is that the only way this will ever get anywhere is if Trump loses in November and the federal judiciary decides they’re through with Trump.