Experts, Former Officials Want to Remove Judge Aileen Cannon from Trump’s Secret Documents Case

A group of former government officials, law professors and Democratic groups are asking Judge Aileen Cannon to recuse herself from a criminal case against former President Donald Trump involving classified documents, citing decisions they say create the appearance of bias.

Cannon’s opponents include former Missouri Republican Rep. Tom Coleman, former New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and several former Republican presidential administration officials. They want the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which is hearing an appeal by special counsel Jack Smith after Cannon dismissed her case, to hear their arguments not only to overturn her decision but also to reassign the case to another judge.

In a letter filed Tuesday by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and other government watchdogs, Cannon essentially charged that her rulings suggested she did not believe former presidents were equal under the law.

“Her rulings and other conduct convey the impression of an unwavering belief that subjecting the former president to ordinary criminal procedures constitutes an unacceptable affront to his dignity,” they wrote.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, ruled on July 15 that Smith’s appointment as special counsel by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland was unlawful and therefore the entire case accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents should be thrown out.

The ruling was a departure from every other court that has weighed in on the issue since Democratic and Republican administrations appointed special and independent prosecutors to oversee politically sensitive investigations with greater independence. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in a July 1 Supreme Court ruling in a presidential immunity case that questioned the legality of the special prosecutors.

“A Pattern of Untenable Decisions”

In one of the letters, signed by Coleman and Whitman along with other former officials and the nonprofit democracy-focused group State Democracy Defenders Action, Cannon is accused of engaging in a “pattern of unjustifiable decisions” that created the appearance of bias. Critics in the letter, which called on the 11th Circuit to reassign the case to another judge, pointed specifically to Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case and an earlier ruling that temporarily barred investigators from examining documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

The 11th Circuit reversed the earlier decision in a strongly worded 2022 decision, calling it a “radical reversal of the order of the case law” and a violation of “fundamental limits on the separation of powers.”

The second brief was submitted Tuesday by CREW with former federal judge Nancy Gertner and two law professors who have written on ethics and judicial conduct, Stephen Gillers of New York University and James J. Sample of Hofstra University.

The group took aim not only at the two rulings highlighted in the initial letter, but also at the nearly year it said Cannon spent delaying the case by offering hearings on “almost every theory Trump’s lawyers could come up with,” before hastily dismissing the case after July 1 following a legal digression by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

This is not the first time Cannon’s oversight in this matter has drawn criticism.

Cannon rejected suggestions from two other judges to recuse herself from the case when it was first assigned to her, according to a New York Times report. Cecilia Altonaga, a George W. Bush appointee and chief judge of Cannon’s federal district court in Florida, told Cannon it would look bad if she oversaw the trial of the case after the controversy over her overturned ruling that hindered the investigation.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Former officials seek to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from Trump documents case