Legal analyst Glenn Kirschner criticized Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s case involving classified documents, labeling her as a representation of “governmental insanity.”
The case involves Trump facing numerous felony charges for allegedly unlawfully retaining classified documents that he took from the White House upon leaving office in 2021, storing them at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and impeding the government’s retrieval efforts.
Trump has entered a plea of not guilty and refuted any accusations of misconduct. Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, recently postponed the trial scheduled for May 20 indefinitely.
In a detailed five-page order, Cannon cited a multitude of complex pre-trial issues as the reason for deeming it “imprudent” to set a new trial date at that time. Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney known for his critical views of the ex-president, addressed the delay of the trial.
Kirschner said, “Judge Aileen Cannon is single-handedly depriving the American people of our right to a fair and timely trial of Donald Trump on those most dangerous criminal offenses he committed…That represents a special kind of governmental insanity.” In response to Cannon’s move, he urged viewers to “roll up our sleeves and we can fill out and submit a judicial misconduct complaint form.”
The decision has sparked criticism from Democrats, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who, as reported by The Hill on Thursday, expressed concerns that Cannon may be “deliberately slow-walking the case.”
Echoing a comparable perspective, Joyce Vance, who served as a U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Barack Obama administration, conveyed in her newsletter, Civil Discourse, on Sunday that “This case could and should have been ready for trial in December or January if she had been working on the motions and realistic deadlines all along.”
During his YouTube video, Kirschner mentioned that Cannon “failed to timely litigate and resolve some of the pre-trial motions that have been sitting there for months, and now due to her own sloth, at best, her inexcusable neglect, she needs to cancel the May 20th trial date.”
Regarding the classified documents case, it was evident that the trial scheduled for May would not commence as planned, as Cannon “let critical motions stack up and refused to rule,” Vance wrote Sunday.
She further explained that according to the Speedy Trial Act, judges are required to establish a trial date at the case’s outset, even before any motions are submitted.
Simultaneously, the classified documents case is one of four criminal cases confronting Trump as he pursues reelection this year. He is presently undergoing trial in Manhattan for a case related to purported hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump has consistently asserted his innocence in all these instances, attributing them to political motives.
