A group is asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from overseeing former President Trump’s classified documents case.
The brief filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) argued Judge Cannon has taken “many efforts to undermine and derail the prosecution of this case.” The brief coincides with special counsel Jack Smith’s appeal of a ruling from Cannon that tossed the documents case entirely in determining Smith was unlawfully appointed.
The CREW brief asks for the documents case to be reassigned to another jurist in South Florida. Smith did not make that request, but the 11th Circuit could independently determine the rare move is warranted.
The Hill has more:
“Even before she dismissed this case on novel and insupportable grounds that ignored both statutory authority and Supreme Court precedent, Judge Cannon’s other extraordinary rulings and sluggish administration of the case had provoked well-founded concerns that she might be biased against the Government’s case and unable to manage that case impartially,” CREW wrote in its motion to file a friend-of-the-court brief filed late Tuesday.
The filing also cites Cannon’s “inexplicable call for jury instructions on a spurious legal defense that would have gutted the Government’s case had it ever gone to trial” after she mulled embracing arguments from Trump on jury instructions even as she failed to account for a trial date in the case.
It also notes “Cannon’s failure over the course of one year to move the case forward in any significant way—until a one-Justice concurrence in the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity opinion expressed approval of the novel constitutional theory that allowed her to end the case.”
That was a nod to an off-topic footnote from Justice Clarence Thomas.
They want to deny Trump a defense