Remove Aileen Cannon From Trump Case, Republicans Urge Judges

A group of Republicans have urged a Florida appeal court to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from Donald Trump’s classified documents case.
They also called for the court to reinstate the case after Cannon dismissed all charges against the former president in July.
Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed all charges after ruling that prosecutor Jack Smith was wrongfully appointed as a special counsel to Trump’s federal cases.
The Republican group’s filing stated that Cannon committed “grave errors” and should be removed from the case.
Trump was facing 40 federal charges in Cannon’s court over his alleged handling of sensitive materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after leaving the White House in January 2021. He was also accused of obstructing efforts by federal authorities to retrieve them.
The Republican presidential nominee had pleaded not guilty and said the case is part of a political witch hunt.
Quoting the 1989 case of U.S. vs. Torkington, which set the standard set for removing a judge from a case, the filing stated that Cannon’s “pattern of unsupportable decisions, along with the district court’s inexplicable handling of procedural matters in this case, makes clear that Judge Cannon ‘has engaged in conduct that gives rise to the appearance of[…]a lack of impartiality in the mind of a reasonable member of the public.'”
They “therefore urge this Court, in addition to reversing the decision below, to exercise its supervisory authority[…]to reassign the matter to another district judge.”
The brief was submitted in support of Smith, who is appealing Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case.
Newsweek sought email comment from Cannon’s office on Thursday.
The group who submitted the document include Donald Ayer, who was deputy attorney general in the first George HW Bush administration; Louis Caldera—who was a United States secretary of the Army; former Republican congressman for Missouri, Tom Coleman; Stuart M. Gerson, who was acting attorney general in 1993; Philip Allen Lacovara, who was deputy solicitor general in Richard Nixon’s administration and counsel in the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office and John McKay, who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington in the George W. Bush administration.
Together they filed an amicus brief, or friend-of-the-court brief, with the appeal court.
An amicus brief is a filing by a court-acknowledged expert that can help a judge reach a decision.
The group said they are “officials, constitutional lawyers, and a nonprofit organization who have collectively spent decades defending the Constitution, the interests of the American people, and the rule of law.”
They noted that an appeal court reversed one of Cannon’s rulings in the case long before she threw out the case.
“If this Court reverses the district court, as amici urge, it will mark the second time it was called upon to correct the district court’s grave errors in this case.”
“Those reversals do not reflect typical differences of opinion among courts and judges. The district court’s decision rejecting the lawfulness of the special counsel’s appointment, in clear defiance of binding Supreme Court precedent and the plain text of Congress’ statutes, falls far outside the range of reasonable judicial decision-making,” they stated.
Newsweek sought email comment from Trump’s attorney on Thursday.
In her dismissal of the charges on July 15, Cannon noted that there is no constitutional backing for appointing Smith, a “private citizen,” as a Department of Justice prosecutor in charge of all of Trump’s federal indictments.
Smith has asked the appeal court to reverse that decision and wrote in a filing on August 26 that Cannon’s “private citizen” remark was more than 150 years out of date.