Judge In Trump's Documents Case Rejected Peers' Calls To Step Aside: Report

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Donald Trump appointee assigned to his classified documents case, rejected calls from more experienced judges to step aside from the case, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Two of Cannon’s more seasoned colleagues on the federal bench in Florida, including the chief judge in the state’s southern district, reportedly asked Cannon to reconsider taking on the job when she drew the assignment in June 2023. Trump nominated her for the lifetime appointment in May 2020, even though she had never served as a judge. Of the 224 cases she’s been assigned, only four have gone to trial, and all four concerned routine matters, taking up a total of 14 trial days, the Times reported when she was assigned to the incredibly high-profile case.

Two people familiar with the efforts to persuade Cannon to step down shared the details with the Times under the condition of anonymity.

The chief judge involved in those efforts, Cecilia Altonaga, reportedly first called Cannon to say it would be better to hand the case off to a judge in Miami, where there was already a secure facility designed to hold the highly classified documents in the case. Cannon refused Altonaga’s initial proposal, the Times reported, and taxpayers have had to pay for construction of a secure room at her courthouse in Fort Pierce.

Altonaga then reportedly placed another call to an unnamed person to raise concerns about the optics of Cannon overseeing the case. According to the Times, she pointed out Cannon’s highly scrutinized actions leading up to Trump’s indictment, which came about after the FBI served a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in 2022 to retrieve highly classified documents he’d taken from the White House