The story, in a way, is that there is any story at all: On Thursday, two sources told The New York Times, in effect, that every liberal critic of Judge Aileen Cannon — every legal analyst who says she has mishandled Donald Trump’s classified documents case, displaying incompetence and prejudice — is absolutely right.
First, go back to the summer of 2022, when Cannon, 43 and appointed to the federal bench by the criminal defendant, first got involved in the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. It was then that she first shocked the legal community by buying Trump’s argument that, perhaps, the government had no right to sift through all the classified documents it found stashed at Mar-a-Lago; perhaps, she ruled, those documents were protected by “executive privilege” and should instead be reviewed by a third party, known as a special master.
