U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is facing sharp criticism following her decision this week to grant a request by former President Donald Trump’s legal team for an independent arbiter to review documents obtained during an FBI search of his Florida property last month. Cannon on Monday authorized an outside legal expert to review the records taken during the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago as part of a probe into Trump’s inappropriate retention of sensitive material from the White House. The expert would have power to weed out any material that might be protected by claims of attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. The order came over the strenuous objections of the Justice Department, which said a so-called special master was not necessary in part because officials had already completed their review of potentially privileged documents. The move was cheered by Trump supporters seeking a check on the government’s probe. But others say Cannon gave undue deference to the former president and unnecessarily put on hold certain investigative work by the Justice Department. They say she has slowed the momentum of the federal investigation into possible Espionage Act violations. The Justice Department has not indicated whether it will appeal, though there are reasons why it might not be eager to do so, including out of concern that it could delay the investigation further or produce case law that it finds unfavorable for future probes, said Brandon Fox, a Los Angeles defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. Regardless, he said, Cannon’s opinion creates a perception of “two systems of justice.” “The criminal justice system is set up to try to make sure that everybody is accountable in the same way for alleged crimes they have committed,” Fox said. “Here, it appears that Mr. Trump is getting special benefit” by virtue of being a former president. Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, told Fox News on Tuesday that the opinion was “deeply flawed in a number of ways.” A little-known federal judge appointed to the bench two years ago by Trump, Monday’s order was easily the most consequential move of her career, thrusting the Colombian-born former federal prosecutor to the center of a simmering legal debate about the confines of executive privilege and presidential power. Cannon is the least senior federal judge for the Southern District of Florida, where five of the 16 active judges were appointed by Trump. According to court rules, cases like the special master request are “assigned on a blind rotation basis … to a judge assigned to hear cases in the division to which the case has been assigned.” During her roughly seven years as an assistant U.S. attorney, Cannon worked mainly out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is part of the same federal district as Miami but about 130 miles (209 kilometers) to the north. The cases there generally do not get the same kind of attention as those in the more densely populated, media-heavy areas around Miami. Beginning in 2013, Cannon prosecuted 41 cases as part of the Major Crimes Division, later handling appeals of criminal convictions and sentences. One of those involved a defendant in a major $800 million Ponzi scheme who unsuccessfully appealed his numerous fraud convictions to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Her opposing counsel in […]

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