Turns out Judge Aileen Cannon will NOT be presiding over Donald Trump’s arraignment tomorrow
When the news broke that Judge Aileen Cannon had been assigned to Donald Trump’s federal criminal trial, it set off all kinds of panicked doomsday hysteria from the media and talking heads. But various legal experts pointed out that one way or the other, there was a good chance the 11th Circuit would find a way to take this case away from Cannon. I also tried to stress the fact that Jack Smith knew he had about 15-20% odds of drawing Cannon when he moved the case to Miami, but he did it anyway, meaning he’s not worried about her or he wouldn’t have moved the case.
Now it turns out Judge Aileen Cannon won’t even be presiding over Trump’s arraignment tomorrow. Instead, a magistrate judge will handle the arraignment. This is a fairly common practice, so it’s not yet entirely clear what’s going on here. Is the 11th Circuit already moving strings to get Cannon off this case? It was announced today that she’s still officially on the case, but will it remain that way?
Or does this mean that Cannon was never actually going to preside over the arraignment, and the media got this wrong on purpose in its desire to feed us doomsday hysteria about how Cannon would handle the arraignment?
Either way, this at least means that Cannon won’t be making any decisions or moves in the Trump case tomorrow. This means that if Jack Smith is planning to preemptively file to get Cannon removed from this case, he has some time to make that happen before any aspect of this case would even get in front of Cannon.
Then again, Jack Smith may not even try to preemptively have Cannon removed. In spite of all the simplistic insistence on Twitter that the 11th Circuit will “have” to remove her if Smith asks, the reality is such a request might not be granted simply based on Cannon’s past antics.
Smith may be planning to wait and see if Cannon actually makes any improper moves in this case that he could use as far more potent grounds for successfully getting her replaced. Smith may have also calculated that Cannon, who has already been slammed by her own 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, may just quietly allow the case to play out properly for fear of having it taken away from her.
We don’t know what Jack Smith’s overall plan is. But again, he’s clearly not that worried about Aileen Cannon, or he wouldn’t have moved the case to Miami to begin with. You have to remember that someone like Smith knows what he’s doing and went into this with a gameplan for how to deal with Cannon if she became a part of it, and that someone like Cannon does not have a magic wand that she can use to help Trump. If Cannon were to try the latter, the appeals court would simply undo it, and it would be Cannon’s undoing. At some point you just have to trust that Smith knows what he’s doing. And now it turns out Smith has a lot more time to deal with Cannon than we’d been led to believe.
