Former President Donald Trump’s new lawsuit against the Jan. 6 House committee was assigned to one of his judicial nominees in Florida, the latest case to highlight the former president’s influence over the courts.
U.S. District Judge Rodolfo “Rudy” Ruiz II, who sits in the Fort Lauderdale division of the south Florida district court, will preside over the case, according to a public notice Monday.
Trump’s impact on the makeup of the Florida courts was underscored when he sued to stop the Justice Department from using thousands of documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago resort in an investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled and possible obstruction. That case was assigned to another Trump nominee, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who faced accusations of bias when she granted Trump’s request for an outside special master to review the documents and temporarily stopped investigators from using them.
