Donald Trump’s legal team got extremely lucky with the assignment of their case against the Justice Department to a judge appointed to the bench by Mr Trump who has made a name for herself with rulings that have baffled legal experts.
The former president’s legal team is now facing accusations from outside legal experts of “judge shopping” as the special master process to determine whether any of the documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate and resort were actually protected by attorney-client privilege.
It’s an accusation that, like most hurled at the former president, will not result in any consequences but illustrates the frustration with which Judge Aileen Cannon’s orders and rulings are being received by independent legal minds.
The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday that a number of law professors and others who looked at the situation surrounding the filing of Mr Trump’s lawsuit have suggested that the attorneys for Mr Trump were specifically aiming to have Ms Cannon selected to oversee the case; some even went as far to suggest that potential wrongdoing had occurred.
“It was basically a home run to get her,” Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson told the Beast. “They clearly made the correct calculation, because Judge Cannon’s rulings legally don’t make sense. They only make sense if you’re trying to help the former president.”
She added that the Trump legal team was clearly “judge shopping” and simply “didn’t like the direction this was taking” under the sole oversight of a federal magistrate judge.
Attorneys active in the area who spoke to the news outlet suggested that the act of filing in person — extremely rare in the modern legal world — pointed to the likelihood that “judge shopping” was indeed afoot. One, who declined to give their name to The Daily Beast, openly speculated that the Trump legal team had relied on a friendly face in the court to get the case assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who according to the newspaper would have otherwise had anywhere from a one-in-three to one-in-nine shot of being assigned the case randomly.
“I think somebody pulled a fast one in the clerk’s office to rotate it to a friendly judge. It doesn’t sound like it was done by the blind filing system,” said that unnamed attorney.
Whatever the reason for Ms Cannon’s selection to the case, the effects of her Trump-friendly rulings are not likely to be more than a delay tactic at best. Any of her rulings can be overturned on appeal, and the Justice Department has already won a victory and barred the special master overseeing the case at Ms Cannon’s appointment from accessing the classified materials seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Mr Trump has continued to accuse the FBI and Justice Department of wrongdoing in the wake of the raid of Mar-a-Lago even as his own attorneys refuse to make his argument that classified materials seized from his estate had in fact been declassified by presidential order.
