Judge Cannon’s Unusual Ruling Is Latest in a Series

Even before her bombshell decision on Monday to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, Judge Aileen M. Cannon has made any number of unorthodox rulings.

Since taking control of the case last June, in fact, many of her decisions have been so outside the norm that they have come to seem like business as usual.

Still, almost no one — including some defense lawyers working on the case — expected Judge Cannon to kill the documents case by ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job. And her timing could not have been more shocking, delivering Mr. Trump a major legal victory on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, where he will soon be formally named as his party’s nominee for president.

Over and over, throughout her handling of the documents case in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in his final year in office, has shown a willingness to grant a serious audience to some of the former president’s most far-fetched defense claims.

She has also repeatedly scheduled hearings in court to debate issues that many, if not most, federal judges would have dealt with on the merits of written filings alone.

Many legal experts questioned her decision to hold a hearing last month on the question of Mr. Smith’s appointment, arguing that several courts reaching back to the Watergate era had already upheld the legality of independent prosecutors. The hearing was even odder, the experts pointed out, because Judge Cannon allowed outside parties who had filed friend-of-the-court briefs to address her directly for up to 30 minutes — a practice that rarely takes place at the