For months, the judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump in Florida has been bashed by critics over the slow pace at which she has addressed a growing list of pretrial motions.
However, the Supreme Court’s landmark opinion on Monday, which found former presidents enjoy “absolute” immunity for official acts and no immunity for unofficial acts, came with an apparent repudiation of the lower courts in Washington, D.C., that operated initially with haste to reject Trump’s sweeping claims of presidential powers.
“Because those courts categorically rejected any form of Presidential immunity, they did not analyze the conduct alleged in the indictment to decide which of it should be categorized as official and which unofficial,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 6-3 decision. The ruling kicks special counsel Jack Smith’s 2020 election subversion case back to the trial court judge to determine which of the aggravating offenses in the indictment may not be covered by presidential immunity.
In recent weeks, media pundits and lawyers have lambasted Judge Aileen Cannon over what they perceive to be a slower-than-average pace when handling Trump’s efforts to challenge his classified documents indictment. The New York Times even reported that Cannon’s own colleagues in South Florida privately urged her to pass the case along to a more experienced judge, given she was only appointed by Trump in late 2020.
“The decisions aren’t coming quick enough. She’s asking too many other people to come in and give their opinions,” Michael van der Veen, a lawyer who represented Trump during his second impeachment, said during a recent appearance on CNN.
George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley took the Supreme Court’s words as a lesson for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, agreeing with Roberts that Chutkan, who presides over the Washington case against Trump, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did a rushed job of handling Trump’s immunity claims. Both lower courts outright rejected Trump’s claims of immunity as Smith repeatedly pushed for a trial to get underway before the Nov. 5 election between Trump and President Joe Biden.
“For all of the criticism of Judge Cannon in Florida for holding hearings and considering arguments, this is why it is important to give serious and sufficient attention to these questions,” Turley said in a post on X, adding that Chutkan was “praised for her speed in supporting Smith’s effort to try Trump before the election.”
In the end, “She was wrong as was the D.C. Circuit,” Turley said, noting he didn’t blame them in an “area with good arguments on both sides,” but underscored that “speed should not be the measure of performance for the courts.”
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner he thinks the Supreme Court’s majority opinion about the haste of federal D.C. courts vindicates Cannon after some of the criticism she has received.
“I do,” Dershowitz said, adding, “I think Cannon is doing a very thoughtful job.”
“The media has been mostly criticizing Trump for trying to go slow, but they have omitted the reality that the other side is trying to go much faster than usual, and Jack Smith admitted it,” Dershowitz said.
Cannon first drew criticism from the public even before Trump was indicted in the classified documents case last summer when she appointed a special master to review evidence collected during the August 2022 raid at Mar-a-Lago. She was reversed by a panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, including two appointees of the former president.
Late last month, the judge held back-to-back hearings over several of Trump’s and Smith’s motions in the case, including Smith’s effort to modify the former president’s conditions of release or impose a narrow “gag order” as defense lawyers have described it, in addition to a bid by Trump to argue Smith was improperly appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Entin told the Washington Examiner he doesn’t believe the Supreme Court’s words for lower courts in Washington and the work that Cannon has been conducting in the separate case down in South Florida are as comparable as some observers may suggest.
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“It may be an incidental effect of the Supreme Court’s decision that she might seem to have gotten a degree of vindication, but I’m not so sure about that,” Entin said.
“She’s just taking a pretty long time to decide stuff that, while it might not be completely routine, given the specifics of the case, she’s taking longer to decide the kinds of pretrial motions that are usually decided more quickly,” the law professor added.