Shortly after Judge Eileen M. Cannon was appointed to handle former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case in June 2023, two of her experienced colleagues in Florida’s federal courts urged her to step down from the assignment and hand it over to another judge, according to two people briefed on the conversations.
The judges who approached Cannon, including Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida, each urged her to consider whether it would be better to recuse herself from the high-profile case and assign it to another judge, two of the people said.
But Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, wanted the case to continue and rejected the justices’ entreaties. Her appointment drew attention because she had little judicial experience and because she had previously shown unusual favoritism, including intervening in Trump’s favor in the criminal investigation that led to his indictment, only to be overturned in a scathing rebuke by a conservative appeals court panel.
The extraordinary, previously undisclosed efforts by Judge Cannon’s colleagues to persuade her to step down add a new dimension to the growing criticism of how she has handled the case.
According to lawyers in the state, she broke with the common practice of federal judges in the Southern District of Florida to delegate some pretrial motions to a magistrate judge, in this case Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, who reports to her but is older and a much more experienced jurist. In 2022, he signed an FBI warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club and residence in Florida, for classified government documents that Trump had kept after leaving office.
Since then, Judge Cannon has shown hostility toward the prosecution, handled pretrial motions slowly, postponed the trial indefinitely, and refused to set a trial date even though both the prosecution and defense had told her they would be ready to go to trial this summer.
But Trump’s legal team has also urged her to postpone the trial until after the election, and her handling of the case has virtually ensured that their strategy will succeed: If Trump retakes the White House, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case.
As Judge Cannon’s handling of cases has come under increasing scrutiny, critics have suggested he may be out of control, siding with Trump, or both.
Against this backdrop, early efforts by her fellow judges to persuade her to step down, and the significance of her decision not to, are being highlighted among other federal judges and those who know them.
Neither Judge Cannon nor Judge Altonaga responded directly to requests for comment, including emails sent through District Court Clerk Angela E. Noble. Noble later wrote in an email that “judges in our court do not comment on pending cases.”
It’s common for junior judges to seek informal advice and guidance from more experienced judges as they learn how to perform their new roles, and as district chief, Judge Altonaga has a formal role in managing the federal courts in South Florida.
But ultimately, Judge Cannon is not bound by the authority of the district court’s elders: Like other judges confirmed by the Senate and appointed by the president, she has life tenure and an independent status, giving her the freedom to ignore such advice.
The two people, who discussed efforts to persuade her to transfer the case, spoke on condition of anonymity. They had each been informed of the case by different federal judges in the Southern District of Florida, including Judge Altonaga.
Neither person would disclose the name of the second federal judge in Florida who contacted Cannon. One of the people acknowledged trying to persuade Cannon to step down but did not provide details about the conversations the two judges had with Cannon. The other person provided more details.
The two communications were by phone, this person said, and the first judge to call Cannon suggested that the case would be better handled by a judge based near the busiest courthouse in the Miami area, where the grand jury that indicted Trump met.
The Miami courthouse also had a secure facility approved to store confidential information that would be argued in pretrial motions and used as evidence in the case. Judge Cannon is the only judge in federal court in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive north of Miami. When she took over the case, the Fort Pierce courthouse did not have a secure facility.
As Judge Cannon continued to hear the case, taxpayers have since had to pay for the construction of a secure room there, known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
According to sources, Judge Altonaga made the call after initial discussions failed to persuade Judge Cannon to resign.
The chief justice, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, reportedly made a tougher argument: that it would look bad for Judge Cannon to oversee the trial given what happened during the criminal investigation that led to Trump being indicted on charges of illegally retaining national security documents after he left office and obstructing government efforts to recover them.
In August 2022, the FBI obtained a search warrant from Judge Reinhart and went to Mar-a-Lago to look for the remaining classified documents that Trump had not turned over despite receiving a subpoena.
Investigators found thousands of government files kept by Trump that, according to the Presidential Records Act, should have been donated to the National Archives when he left office. The files recovered by the FBI included more than 100 classified items, some of which were among the most highly restricted.
Shortly after the search, Trump filed a lawsuit against the government, protesting the seizure of documents he claimed were his personal property and seeking the appointment of a special master to review the documents. While the normal procedure would have been to refer the case to Judge Reinhart, Judge Cannon chose to rule himself.
She shocked legal experts across ideological lines by barring investigators from accessing evidence and appointing a special master who would only make recommendations to her but said the final decision would be hers.
Judge Cannon’s decision was unusual because she intervened before the indictment was filed and treated Trump differently from the usual target of a search warrant because of his special status as a former president.
She also instructed the special master to consider whether some of the seized files should be permanently shielded from investigators under executive privilege, an idea widely seen as questionable because it has never been successfully implemented in a criminal case.
Prosecutors appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. A three-judge panel, including two appointees by Trump, rejected the appeal, overturning the prosecutor’s order and ruling that she lacked the legal authority to intervene in the first place.
“While the execution of a warrant at the home of a former president is certainly unusual, it does not affect our legal analysis or provide judicial authority for interference in an ongoing investigation,” the committee wrote.
The limits on when courts can intervene in criminal investigations “apply regardless of whom the government is investigating,” the ministry added. “To make a special exception here would violate a fundamental national principle that our laws ‘apply to all, regardless of numbers, wealth or status.'”
Trump’s legal team appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. In December 2022, Judge Cannon dismissed Trump’s lawsuit.
Six months later, a grand jury in Miami indicted Trump, detailing allegations that he stored highly classified documents in a bathroom and on a stage at Mar-a-Lago and led aides and lawyers in relentlessly obstructing efforts by the Justice Department and the National Archives to retrieve them.
The district’s clerk said that under standard district practice, the new case would go into a system that randomly assigns it to one of a small number of judges in either the West Palm Beach division, which covers Mar-a-Lago, or the neighboring Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale divisions.
It went into Judge Cannon’s hands.
