Outgoing US President Donald Trump waves to supporters lined along on the route to his Mar-a-Lago estate on January 20, 2021 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
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Judge Aileen Cannon recently handed Trump’s defense team a big win.
The decision baffled some legal experts, putting a spotlight on the 41-year-old judge.
She previously ruled in a case involving Pelosi and AOC.
Judge Aileen Cannon was randomly assigned one of the nation’s most closely watched cases involving Donald Trump, and her recent ruling for the former president who nominated her has cast a spotlight on her life and legal record.
Cannon, 41, has given the Department of Justice and Trump’s legal team a deadline of midnight Friday to suggest a list of people for the role of special master.
The job will have to go to someone with top-notch security clearances, and will involve weeding through 11,000 documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s oceanfront Palm Beach, Florida, residence and private club.
Some legal experts have cricized Cannon’s decision, including Republicans.
“The opinion, I think, was wrong,” Bill Barr, who was attorney general under Trump, said Tuesday on Fox News. “And I think the government should appeal it. It’s deeply flawed in a number of ways.”
Trump nominated Cannon in April 2020 and the Senate confirmed her by a vote of 56-21 shortly after Trump lost his reelection bid. Twelve Democrats voted to confirm her and 23 senators didn’t vote.
Since the confirmation, a least one other Cannon case received national headlines. In April, Cannon oversaw a criminal case in which a Florida man threatened to behead House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Judge Aileen Cannon gave her confirmation testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee over Zoom on July 29, 2020.
Senate Judiciary Committee
Cannon is bilingual and explored journalism
Few details are available about Cannon’s short career, though some details of her life were shared in a document she filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with her testimony during her confirmation hearing.
Cannon was born in Cali, Colombia, and she and her older sister were raised in Miami, Florida.
She shared from Zoom during her July 29, 2020, confirmation hearing that her mother, Mercedes Cubas, fled Cuba as a child and instilled in her “the blessing that is this country and the importance of securing of the rule of law for generations to come.”
She also thanked her grandparents who taught her “always to be thankful for this country and to cherish our constitutional Democracy.”
Cannon went to college at Duke University and spent a semester in Spain. She was a journalist for a summer with El Nuevo Herald, the daily Spanish-language sister newspaper to the Miami Herald. She wrote stories about yoga during pregnancy, Latina artists, and flamenco dance, according to the Senate document she filled out.
Cannon then attended and graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and during that time she joined the conservative Federalist Society — an organization six Supreme Court justices also belonged to.
Cannon wrote that she joined “because I enjoyed the diversity of legal viewpoints” and that she “found interesting the organization’s discussions about the constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law, and the limited role of the judiciary to say what the law is — not to make the law.”
Cannon next clerked for Judge Steven Colloton in Iowa, who was one of the judges Trump had promised to consider for a Supreme Court vacancy.
For three years Cannon worked in Washington, DC, at the corporate law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, before heading back to Florida to work as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of Florida. There, she prosecuted cases involving narcotics, fraud, firearms, and immigration cases, according to her Senate confirmation document.
Cannon got engaged to her now-husband, Josh Lorence, during a vacation in Athens, Greece, where a giant turtle briefly interrupted Lorence’s proposal, according to a feature about their wedding in The Knot.
They were married when Cannon was 28, in Miami’s eclectic Coconut Grove neighborhood, where they treated their guests to wedding favors of lavender-honey soaps. The couple has two children, according to Cannon’s testimony, and they live in Vero Beach, Florida.
—Ellen Enders (@EllenEnders) September 6, 2022Florida governor Ron DeSantis released a survey asking school board members and candidates to share their view on controversial education policies.
Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
Cannon’s paths cross top Florida politicians
Lorence is now an executive at Bobby’s Burger Palace, a chain founded by celebrity chef Bobby Flay, according to a LinkedIn profile recently removed.
He and Cannon both gave $100 to then-congressman Ron DeSantis’ campaign for governor in 2018. DeSantis is up for reelection this year and is considered a top GOP candidate for the 2024 nomination for the White House, particulary if Trump doesn’t run.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida reached out to Cannon in 2019 about filling a judicial vacancy, according to her nomination questionnaire. Cannon during her confirmation hearing thanked Rubio as well as fellow Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida for their “continued support.”
“Judge Cannon is a great judge who I am very proud to have enthusiastically supported,” Rubio told Insider through his office when asked about the connection. “She received strong bipartisan support from both my judicial advisory commission and from the US Senate. The attacks against her are just the latest example of hypocrisy from leftists and their media enablers who believe the only time it is acceptable to attack a judge is if that judge rules against what they want.”
Cannon had been a lawyer for 12 years when Trump nominated her. During her confirmation hearing, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked her and other nominees whether they’d ever had discussions about loyalty with Trump, and all replied no.
In the case involving Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, Cannon gave the man, Paul Hoeffer, an 18-month prison sentence even though prosecutors had asked for 3.5 years. His defense team asked for leniency because Hoeffer had recently received a cancer diagnosis, though Cannon’s ruling was lower than minimum federal sentencing guidelines, according to the Palm Beach Post.
In April, Cannon increased a 17.5-year prison sentence by 6.5 years for a Palm Beach Gardens man who hurled a chair and threatened to kill federal prosecutor, according to the Palm Beach Post.
Cannon typically works out of her Fort Pierce, Florida, courtroom. But during the special master hearing on September 1 she took the case from Paul G. Rogers Courthouse in West Palm Beach.
An Insider reporter was present at the hearing, in which security guards told journalists they were not allowed to tweet quotes from the hearing and were not permitted to record remarks or transmit information to anyone outside the courtroom. Federal courts have varying laws about such practices — with some, such as the courtroom in Palm Beach — allowing computers, and others not.
Two CNN journalists were removed from the courtroom during the hearing in what turned out to be a false acusation of tweeting. The reporters were permitted to re-enter the room toward the end of the hearing.
Cannon said in her ruling approving the special master, issued just a few days after the hearing, that she was focused on “the appearance of fairness.”
The special master is supposed to be an independent arbiter focused on singling out documents that could be protected by atorney-client and executive privilege.
Cannon’s decision pauses the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation against Trump but will allow the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to continue their investigation into whether Trump’s handling of the documents created national security risks.
The DOJ is expected to appeal.