Aileen Cannon

Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee who sits on the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, also blocked federal prosecutors from further ...

“To any lawyer with serious federal criminal court experience who is being honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even flimsier,” he wrote in an email. “This court is giving special considerations to the former president that ordinary, everyday citizens do not receive.” “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.” to take anything else of his that he had left in the same containers as evidence of how he stored sensitive information. They included whether he had an individual interest in and need for the seized property, would be “irreparably harmed” by a denial of that request and lacked any other remedy. “In addition to being deprived of potentially significant personal documents, which alone creates a real harm,” she wrote, Mr. But Judge Cannon wrote that the justices had not “ruled out the possibility” that a former president could ever prevail over the current one. [request for an independent arbiter](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/us/politics/trump-special-master.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-trump-raid&variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc), known as a special master, to review the documents the F.B.I. It is assessing the risk to national security that the insecure holding of sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago may have caused. “Even if there is some hypothetical situation in which a former president could shield his or her communications from the current executive branch,” Mr. “This would seem to me to be a genuinely unprecedented decision by a judge,” Mr. She granted the arbiter, known as a special master, broad powers that extended beyond filtering materials that were potentially subject to attorney-client privilege to also include executive privilege.

Judge Aileen Cannon's appointment of a special master sets a dangerous legal precedent.

For the DOJ, the appointment of a special master in the Mar-A-Lago investigation creates a logistical nightmare by inserting the judiciary into an essential function of the executive branch, namely the conducting of criminal investigations and prosecutions. But even avoiding the use of those documents would not stop Trump’s arguments that the DOJ didn’t properly avoid all use of those documents. Her opinion could open a floodgate of baseless requests for injunctive relief, which will jam the criminal justice system, even if most of them will be denied in slam-dunk fashion. She even pointed out the stigma attached to Trump having to suffer the indignity of a search warrant being conducted on his home. But she failed to explain how the appointment of a special master can undo that stigma—given that the search already happened. To start, Judge Cannon’s opinion is deeply flawed, resting as it does on a number of ill-founded assumptions.