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By Kate Plummer
Senior US News Reporter
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The judge overseeing Donald Trump's classified-documents case in Florida is "on thin ice" and risks being removed from the case, an ex-prosecutor has said.
Asked about his opinion of Judge Aileen Cannon, nominated to the bench by Trump, legal commentator David Lat told Preet Bharara on the Stay Tuned With Preet podcast that the justice was on probation due to a series of decisions during the high-profile case.
Cannon is overseeing the former president's Mar-a-Lago indictment. In June 2023, Trump was charged with retaining national security information—including U.S. nuclear secrets and plans for military retaliation in the event of an attack—and obstructing efforts to retrieve them.
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Prosecutors have said Trump took documents that he was no longer authorized to have after leaving the White House in January 2021 and that he resisted repeated requests by federal officials to return them. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the charges. Newsweek contacted a spokesperson for Trump's campaign by email on Friday.
Cannon has been criticized for making a number of decisions that favored the former president, including ones that could potentially delay the start of the trial, scheduled for May.
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In her latest move that has sparked intrigue, Cannon on Thursday accepted two amicus briefs filed by the America First Legal Foundation group and former President Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese arguing that the case should be thrown out. Some commentators questioned this decision.
Lat said: "I would kind of put Judge Cannon in the probation category. I don't think the 11th circuit would remove her just yet from this case. But I think she's on thin ice and, if she made another error like she did in the pre-indictment phase of this case where she basically was telling the executive, the U.S. Attorney's office that they couldn't investigate something, which is really not her province to do, then I think she could get booted."
Lat was referring to when Cannon issued an order prohibiting the U.S. government from "further review and use of any of the materials" seized from Mar-a-Lago for criminal investigative purposes in 2022.
Lat added that a judge must "repeatedly mess up" before they are removed from a case, and that happens very rarely.
Aside from accepting amicus briefs, in February, Cannon was accused of bias towards Trump after she ordered federal prosecutors to hand over unredacted materials sought by the former president's legal team in discovery, as well as the two other co-defendants in the case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
The Mar-a-Lago indictment is one of four concerning the GOP presidential frontrunner. In total, Trump is facing 91 felony charges. He has denied wrongdoing in all of his cases and has said charges against him are politically motivated.
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