Aileen Cannon's Surprising Record of Siding With Jack Smith

Judge Aileen Cannon has a surprising record of ruling in special counsel Jack Smith's favor, a Newsweek analysis shows.

A review of Cannon's rulings reveals that she has been more likely to side with the Justice Department on disputes between the prosecution and the defense but that she has also ruled in ways that benefited Donald Trump's legal team.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, has faced fierce criticism over her handling of his classified documents case. The U.S. District judge has drawn scrutiny over several decisions that legal experts say cast doubt on her impartiality and has even faced several calls to recuse herself from the criminal case.

Trump is facing 40 felony counts related to his alleged mishandling of classified and top-secret documents after leaving the White House. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and maintains that the case is politically motivated.

Out of 16 times that Smith and Trump asked Cannon for different rulings, Cannon issued orders in favor of Smith 11 times and Trump five times. But the judge has also issued nine orders that gave the former president reason to celebrate, including two that paused filing deadlines and one that granted his attorneys an extension to reply to their own filing.

Because delaying the trial has been one of Trump's top legal strategies, those three orders were all welcome news to Trump. There was similar good news for the former president this past November, when Cannon denied Smith's request to set a deadline for the defense to disclose what information it intends to use at trial.

On Wednesday, the judge gave another sign that Smith won't be getting his proposed July 8 trial date. She set a deadline for Trump to reveal which of the files he plans to use in his defense just seven weeks before Smith's date for the trial.

Cannon has also issued two scathing orders, including one that criticized Smith's "expedient" reading of the law and another that ruled the special counsel's arguments "lack merit." And she issued a third order that denied Smith's motion to keep the proposed jury questionnaire sealed.

Accusations of a bias in favor of Trump came early after she issued one of her first orders in the Florida case, when she denied last June the Justice Department's request to keep its 84 witnesses a secret.

Those criticisms grew last October after she agreed to allow confidential records to be placed in a Florida facility despite Smith's arguments that some of those documents should be kept in a secure facility in Washington, D.C. Trump's team did not request that the records be moved.

In addition, Cannon has outright sided with Trump in a number of legal battles. She has twice granted Trump's requests to have several court filings unsealed, and in January she denied Smith's motion to compel Trump to reveal if he would use an "advice-of-counsel" defense in the trial. She also granted a hearing on Trump's request to dismiss the charges under the Presidential Records Act (PRA) in March, even though Smith urged her to reject those claims.

But she has also delivered several wins to the prosecution. She rejected Trump's demand to postpone the trial until after the election in a November order, his efforts to push pretrial deadlines in a February order, and his attempt to review sensitive court filings in a separate order later that month.

Cannon also denied Trump's efforts to file consolidated briefs after Smith had complained that it was a "relentless and misleading" ploy by Trump to delay the trial "at any cost." In December, she approved Smith's request to move forward with the jury questionnaire, which the Justice Department has argued will help expedite the jury screening process.

Most critical, however, are the two orders Cannon issued that rejected Trump's efforts to have the criminal charges dismissed against him entirely.

In March, she denied the former president's motion to dismiss the charges because of unconstitutional vagueness, finding that while Trump's argument warranted "serious consideration," she did not want to "prematurely decide" the issues raised. Trump's lawyers could still raise these arguments later because Cannon dismissed them without prejudice.

Earlier this month, Cannon rejected Trump's other motion to dismiss, which argued that the PRA protects him from prosecution. But even as she allowed the case to move forward, finding that the charges in question don't rely on the PRA, the judge wrote harshly about Smith, calling his demands "unprecedented and unjust."