Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case, “represents a special kind of governmental insanity,” attorney and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said on Saturday.
Trump is facing dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally keeping classified documents that he took with him after he left the White House in 2021 at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and then obstructing the government’s efforts to get them back. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has denied wrongdoing.
Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, postponed the May 20 trial indefinitely on Tuesday.
In a five-page order, Cannon wrote that it would be “imprudent” to finalize the new trial date due to a “myriad and interconnected pre-trial” issues remaining.
In a Saturday YouTube video on his channel in which he discussed the trial’s postponement, Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and frequent critic of the former president, said that “Judge Aileen Cannon is single-handedly depriving the American people of our right to a fair and timely trial of Donald Trump on those most dangerous criminal offenses he committed…That represents a special kind of governmental insanity.” In response to Cannon’s move, he urged viewers to “roll up our sleeves and we can fill out and submit a judicial misconduct complaint form.”
Newsweek reached out via email to Kirschner for comment. Newsweek attempted to contact the clerk’s office of the U.S. Southern District of Florida after hours, but was unable to reach them.
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The move has also drawn blowback from Democrats, like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who, according to The Hill on Thursday, said it appears that Cannon is “deliberately slow-walking the case.”
In his YouTube video, Kirschner said that Cannon “failed to timely litigate and resolve some of the pre-trial motions that have been sitting there for months, and now due to her own sloth, at best, her inexcusable neglect, she needs to cancel the May 20th trial date.”
Sharing a similar view, Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama under the Barack Obama administration, wrote in her newsletter, Civil Discourse, on Sunday, “This case could and should have been ready for trial in December or January if she had been working on the motions and realistic deadlines all along.”
In the classified documents case, it has been clear that the trial would not start in May as Cannon “let critical motions stack up and refused to rule,” Vance wrote Sunday.
The Speedy Trial Act directs judges to set a trial date at the beginning of a case before motions are even filed, she added.
Meanwhile, the classified documents case is among four criminal cases that Trump is facing as he seeks reelection this year. He is currently on trial in Manhattan in a case charging him in connection with alleged hush money payments that were made during his 2016 presidential campaign. In all the cases, Trump has maintained his innocence and said they’re politically motivated. It’s not clear, however, if the other three cases will reach trial before November’s general election.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.