The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified-documents trial has faced renewed calls to recuse herself from the case after she reprimanded Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team for a word count on their legal filings.
Judge Aileen Cannon was appointed to the bench in 2018 by the former president. She has been criticized by legal experts for her response to federal prosecutors urging her not to be “manipulated” by Trump into delaying the federal trial, which is set to begin in May 2024. The frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges in connection to the classified documents case and has repeatedly called the trial a political witch hunt.
Legal experts have told Newsweek that they doubt Cannon will be removed or recuse herself from the trial this far into the proceedings.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified-documents trial has faced renewed calls to recuse herself from the case after she reprimanded Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team for a word count on their legal filings.
The frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges in connection to the classified documents case and has repeatedly called the trial a political witch hunt.
Stephen E. Smith, legal professor at Santa Clara University in California, added that the chances of the Department of Justice seeking Cannon’s removal is “unlikely to the point of wholly unlikely.”
Cannon said in a recent hearing that she was open to moving the classified documents trial as the timing of the other criminal investigations involving Trump may complicate the current schedule.
There was also the added complexity of establishing secure rooms in which both prosecutors and defense lawyers can review the highly sensitive documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
In response, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman posted on X: "Biased or not, Cannon simply doesn’t have game; and she masks it with prickly remonstrations of the government.
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