1. Aileen Mercedes Cannon was born on 1981 and is an American lawyer serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida since 2020.
56 Facts About Aileen Cannon
1. 2.
Aileen Cannon worked for the corporate law firm Gibson Dunn from 2009 to 2012 and was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida from 2013 to 2020.
3.
In 2022, Cannon presided over the case of Donald J Trump v United States of America.
4.
Aileen Cannon ordered the US government to pause using materials seized from Trump's private club and residence in its investigation and granted Trump's request for a special master to review the material.
5.
Aileen Cannon then dismissed Trump's lawsuit per orders from the Eleventh Circuit.
6.
Aileen Cannon's rulings have received considerable media attention, with many legal experts criticizing her decisions and alleging bias over her handling of Trump's legal cases.
7.
Aileen Cannon's mother had fled Cuba as a girl after the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, and her father is from Indiana.
8.
Aileen Cannon grew up in Miami, Florida, where she attended Ransom Everglades School, a private school.
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Aileen Cannon graduated from Duke University in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts.
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Aileen Cannon then attended the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an articles editor for the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform and was a quarter-finalist in the school's moot court competition.
11.
Aileen Cannon has been a member of the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society since 2005, when she was a law student.
12.
From 2008 to 2009, Aileen Cannon served as a law clerk for Judge Steven Colloton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Iowa.
13.
In one case in 2011, Aileen Cannon defended the former leader of the fixed income desk of Thomas Weisel Partners, before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority; the former leader was cleared of fraud in the case.
14.
From 2013 to 2020, Aileen Cannon was an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
15.
In 2018, Aileen Cannon was part of the prosecution that won an appellate case involving Mutual Benefits Corporation's former lawyer Anthony Livoti Jr.
16.
In 2019, Cannon was part of the prosecution that won an appellate case involving Scott W Rothstein, which allowed prosecutors to withdraw support for reducing his 50-year sentence for a Ponzi scheme.
17.
Aileen Cannon has participated in at least three events funded by George Mason University, a conservative law school, which she did not disclose as required.
18.
Aileen Cannon expressed interest that month and subsequently was interviewed by representatives for Senator Rubio and Senator Rick Scott, as well as White House and Justice Department legal officials.
19.
On May 21,2020, at age 39, Aileen Cannon was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
20.
Aileen Cannon was nominated to the seat left vacant by Judge Kenneth Marra, who assumed senior status on August 1,2017.
21.
The American Bar Association required at least 12 years of law practice as one of their approval criteria, and Aileen Cannon met that standard.
22.
Law360 reported that Aileen Cannon "avoided scrutiny" during her July 2020 Senate confirmation hearing as the senators "took it easy" on her.
23.
In May 2024, NPR reported that Aileen Cannon had violated internal judiciary rules and federal ethics law when she did not timely disclose that in 2021 and 2022, she was privately reimbursed when attending two legal seminars at a luxury resort in Montana organized by George Mason University, and only disclosed it when NPR enquired about the matter; Aileen Cannon's court clerk responded by blaming the missing information on "inadvertent" technical issues.
24.
Aileen Cannon was reimbursed by the university's Antonin Scalia Law School, which has been described by The New York Times as an intended paragon of "conservative legal scholarship and influence".
25.
Aileen Cannon has generally ruled in the prosecution's favor in each of these matters.
26.
Aileen Cannon was forced to restart the jury selection process before the trial ended in a plea bargain without the jury deliberating.
27.
The courtroom in which this took place is the same one in which the 2024 criminal trial United States v Trump was set to take place, which prompted concern from one legal scholar about how Cannon would handle space restrictions.
28.
On September 5,2022, Aileen Cannon granted Trump's request for a special master to review the seized materials for attorney-client privilege and executive privilege and ordered the Justice Department to stop using the seized material in its investigation until the special master's review was complete or until a further court order.
29.
Furthermore, Aileen Cannon rejected the Justice Department's argument that Trump's possession of the material risked "imminent disclosure of classified information".
30.
Aileen Cannon cited "leaks to the media after the underlying seizure" of the documents, without specifying what sources might have been responsible for the leaks.
31.
On September 21,2022, the Eleventh Circuit stayed portions of Aileen Cannon's ruling, allowing around 100 classified documents to be used in the Justice Department's investigation and rescinding the requirement for the special master to review the classified documents.
32.
The appeals court stated that under Aileen Cannon "the district court abused its discretion in exercising equitable jurisdiction" over the case chiefly because of Aileen Cannon's own conclusion that Trump "did not show that the United States acted in callous disregard of his constitutional rights", which was a critical factor in determining jurisdiction.
33.
Furthermore, while Aileen Cannon ruled that Trump had an interest in some of the seized documents, the appeals court found that this did not apply to the classified documents and that under Aileen Cannon "the district court made no mention" of why or how Trump "might have an individual interest in or need for the classified documents", which was another factor in determining jurisdiction.
34.
Aileen Cannon was the subject of ethics complaints over her handling of this case, but the complaints were dismissed in December 2022 by the Eleventh Circuit's chief judge, William Pryor.
35.
Aileen Cannon was assigned in June 2023 to oversee the criminal case against former president Donald Trump.
36.
Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, opined that Aileen Cannon should recuse from the criminal case, as "her impartiality might reasonably be questioned", due to her being "partial to Trump as a former President" in the previous civil case.
37.
However, there was no indication that Aileen Cannon would recuse herself, and she soon began issuing orders related to the examination of evidence in the case.
38.
In June 2023, The New York Times analysed records by Bloomberg Law of Aileen Cannon's handling of criminal cases as a federal judge, finding that before Trump's criminal case, she had presided over 224 criminal cases, of which only four criminal cases went to trial, with a cumulative 14 trial days.
39.
In late June 2023, Aileen Cannon ruled against the Department of Justice, denying its request to keep the identities of 84 potential witnesses under seal.
40.
Aileen Cannon rejected the notion that sealed filings were required "to comport with grand jury secrecy", striking two sealed filings by prosecutors from the court record.
41.
Several legal experts, including notable constitutional scholar Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe, as well as notable former federal prosecutors Andrew Weissmann and Joyce Vance, indicated that the propriety of the grand jury proceedings were obvious, and that Aileen Cannon's questioning of their propriety was alarming.
42.
Politico reported that Aileen Cannon "has run the pretrial process at a leisurely pace that will make a postponement [of the scheduled May 2024 trial] almost inevitable, according to experts on criminal prosecutions related to classified information"; Politico further states that if the trial is postponed to after the 2024 United States presidential election, Trump could become president and would then be "expected" to instruct the Justice Department to end the case.
43.
In February 2024, Aileen Cannon granted Trump's team's motion for the names of witnesses in this case and their testimony to be publicly revealed; this caused the government's prosecutors to ask Aileen Cannon to reconsider, citing "significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment" which has been seen in other Trump cases.
44.
In March 2024, Aileen Cannon denied without prejudice an attempt by Trump to dismiss the case.
45.
Aileen Cannon wrote that Trump's team had raised "various arguments warranting serious consideration", then indicated that the Trump team's arguments about the Espionage Act being too vague could instead be brought up again later in "connection with jury-instruction briefing".
46.
Aileen Cannon ruled to indefinitely postpone the trial, citing many pre-trial matters to settle.
47.
Aileen Cannon accepted Trump's requests to have pre-trial hearings on the appropriateness of the appointment of the special counsel and the potential expansion of recognizing more government agencies as part of the prosecution, which would allow Trump to conduct the discovery process on them.
48.
Aileen Cannon scheduled pre-trial activities to continue up to July 22,2024, at the earliest.
49.
At this point, The Guardian stated that Aileen Cannon has "generally given wide deference to Trump and his legal team, granting nearly all extensions they have requested and entertaining his most brazen defense theories, even if they have been without precedent in Espionage Act cases".
50.
The Washington Post stated in May 2024 that Aileen Cannon's "rulings are generally hailed as uniquely wise" by Trump supporters, and she has "been celebrated by adherents of the QAnon movement".
51.
Aileen Cannon was specifically advised to transfer the case to a jurist in Miami, where they already had a secure facility in which to store and review the sensitive documents, but she declined, and so a new facility had to be constructed at Fort Pierce, at taxpayers' expense.
52.
On July 15,2024, Aileen Cannon dismissed the case against Trump, ruling that "Special Counsel Smith's appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution", with a rationale mirroring that of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' concurrence in a closely timed case involving Trump.
53.
Aileen Cannon intervened after Trump and defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira urged her to block Smith's report.
54.
In reaction to Aileen Cannon's order, Trump responded that Aileen Cannon was a "brilliant judge with great courage".
55.
On January 13, Aileen Cannon declined to block the release of Volume I of Smith's report beyond that day; Volume I describes Trump's actions after the 2020 election interfering with the peaceful transfer of power.
56.
Aileen Cannon donated $100 to Ron DeSantis's gubernatorial campaign in 2018.