Your Evening Briefing: Trump-Picked Judge Triggers Firestorm With Ruling

When US District Judge Aileen Cannon, 41, was up for Senate confirmation in 2020, she was asked whether she’d had discussions about loyalty to then-President Donald Trump. “No,” Cannon responded under oath. Now, however, suspicions of Trump loyalty have exploded around Cannon, who on Monday issued a sweeping decision granting Trump’s request to appoint a special master to assess documents seized by the FBI in its Aug. 8 search of his Florida home. Beyond a typical review for material covered by attorney-client privilege, Cannon made the unprecedented judgment that executive privilege may be considered, too. This despite broad consensus among legal experts that the only executive who can assert that privilege right now is President Joe Biden—not Trump.

Cannon, who has said she is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, also ordered the Justice Department to temporarily stop using the documents, including highly classified files, in its criminal investigation of Trump. Both moves elicited howls as almost entirely unmoored from law or precedent: Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who was a senior member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during the probe of alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, called Cannon’s ruling “nutty” and “lawless.” New York University law professor Chris Sprigman said it was “partisan hack judging,” while prominent lawyer Ted Boutrous derided Cannon’s order as “the opposite of judicial restraint.” Cannon, who took the unorthodox step of announcing her intent well before hearing both sides, agreed with Trump’s lawyers that the investigation of the former president needed additional “safeguards” unavailable to ordinary citizens. Trump appeared to praise Cannon on Monday, saying “it takes courage and ‘guts’ to fight a totally corrupt Department of ‘Justice’ and the FBI.”