Trump’s docs case: Florida Judge’s special master appointment lifts her profile but raises legal eyebrows

Taking an exception to the ruling, Trump’s own former Attorney General William P. Barr observed that the judge did not adequately address a key issue in dispute: whether a former President may invoke executive privilege to keep the executive branch itself from reviewing documents while investigating a potential crime. He said the answer is NO.

“The opinion, I think, was wrong,” Barr said on Fox News on Tuesday. “And I think the government should appeal it. It’s deeply flawed in a number of ways.”

However, Valentin Rodriguez Jr., a defense lawyer based in West Palm Beach, who worked opposite Cannon, 41, when she was a prosecutor and has appeared before her as a judge, said she was thorough, meticulous and often willing to rule against the government, as she did in Trump’s case.

“The general feeling that I’ve gotten from her is: ‘I don’t buy everything the government has to tell me’,” Rodriguez said. “You can’t expect that if you and the government have some sort of agreement, over sentencing or a plea, that’s necessarily going to convince. In that sense, you could call her something of a freethinker.”

Judge Cannon has gone to the length of allowing Trump’s legal team to clarify its argument after an initial filing that was too vague. During a hearing in the Trump case last week, she also seemed to help one of Trump’s lawyers remember that his client’s request for a special master included not only to review documents under attorney-client privilege but also to assess any that could be covered under executive privilege.

As a judge, she had not overseen cases that attracted much attention before she was assigned Trump’s high-profile lawsuit. She got the case after Trump avoided visiting the issue with the magistrate who approved the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, media reports said.

Many of her hearings in the Southern District of Florida were at first handled via Zoom during the pandemic days. And she works out of a courthouse in Fort Pierce, which has its share of routine drug and immigration cases but is generally a far quieter part of the region than bustling Miami. Its like visiting a mausoleum, reports said.

Little is publicly known about Judge Cannon, 41, whose name quickly became familiar after her ruling during the holiday weekend. She joined the conservative Federalist Society as a law student in 2005 and maintained her ties to the group as her career unfolded, a fact that she made public during her Senate confirmation hearings in 2020. But according to people involved in the group’s activities, she was not an especially visible presence.

Howard Srebnick, a Miami lawyer who went to the same high school as her, said: “I don’t think anyone could say she’s professionally or intellectually unqualified. And as a prosecutor, he found her to be polite and respectful of defence lawyers – a trait that not all prosecutors share. “As a judge”, he said, “you may not agree with her decisions, but she is always respectful of the process.”

–IANS