Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case, has said she declared two “luxury” resort trips to Montana that were mentioned in a National Public Radio investigation.
“Cannon, herself a Trump appointee, attended two seminars at a luxury resort in Montana, but the privately funded seminar disclosures for both events were not posted online until NPR began making inquiries,” NPR’s online investigation states.
“Clerk of court Angela Noble told NPR in an email that the absence of the disclosures was due to technical issues and that ‘Any omissions to the website are completely inadvertent,” it adds.
United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Cannon is overseeing the case, in which former president Donald Trump 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.
Cannon’s office told Newsweek that the two trips are likely listed on the U.S government’s federal judge disclosure website. The court clerk stated in an email to Newsweek that “there are two trips listed for Judge Cannon. These are likely the trips you are referring to. You can find them here” with a link to the U.S government’s website.
The links show that the seminars were funded by the George Mason University Foundation.
Cannon attended the seminars, known as the Sage Lodge Colloquium, from September 26, 2021 to October 2, 2021 and from September 25, 2022 to October 1, 2022, according to the federal judge disclosure website. In August, 2023 Newsweek reported on her disclosure of both of these Montana trips.
Newsweek sought email comment from NPR on Thursday.
Federal judges must declare any free trips on their disclosure documents.
NPR’s allegations about Cannon are part of a larger investigation into undeclared free trips taken by federal judges.
The investigation, released on NPR’s website on Wednesday, claims that “dozens of federal judges failed to fully disclose free luxury travel to judicial conferences around the world, as required by internal judiciary rules and federal ethics law.”
“As a result, the public remained in the dark about potential conflicts of interest for some of the United States’ top legal officials,” it adds.
NPR alleges that “federal judges — occasionally with family members or even their dog in tow — traveled to luxury resorts in locations as far-flung as London; Palm Beach, Fla.; Bar Harbor, Maine; and the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park for week-long seminars. The judges received free rooms, free meals and free money toward travel expenses, together worth a few thousand dollars.”
It claims that some federal judges heard from a group that uses “lawsuits in federal court to change environmental policy, as well as from corporate CEOs in the oil and pharmaceutical industries.”
It comes after intense criticism of some Supreme Court judges for undeclared foreign trips.
In December 2023, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that it issued subpoenas to Leonard Leo, a conservative activist, and the billionaire Harlan Crow, compelling them to appear before the committee to answer questions about their relationship with Justice Clarence Thomas.
The subpoenas were the latest steps in the committee’s inquiry into the Supreme Court justices. The committee’s Republican minority, which supports Thomas, walked out of the committee hearing in protest.
Thomas is facing an investigation for allegedly accepting lavish vacations from Crow—including a $500,000 trip to Indonesia in 2019—getting money from another donor to buy a recreational vehicle and other ethics violations.
In December, Crow’s spokesman said in a statement to Newsweek that Crow had done all he could to cooperate with the committee, despite concerns about his constitutional rights. The statement also said that issuing Crow a subpoena was a headline-grabbing exercise.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.