This is an article that could well be titled Understanding Cannon, in the manner of Understanding Derrida, Understanding Art or some other impenetrable subject. Written by a trained lawyer, it is too heavy on the inside chambers clerkship angle for my taste, so I will summarize it and excerpt when needed.
The writer holds that Judge Aileen "Loose" Cannon is smart, "quite smart"; that she is not a "pro-Trump political hack", both views contrary to those of "Many outside observers" who "dismiss" Cannon as dense and a kangaroo court judge. "Everything was going fine" for Cannon as a judge, David Lat writes, until Trump I, the special master case. True, she was appointed by Trump and was shortly thereafter randomly assigned to Trump I, the special master case; and true, in her rulings in Trump I and Trump II, the substantive docs case, to which she also was randomly assigned, "she definitely leans too far in Trump’s direction" and gives "dubious arguments from his legal team more consideration than they deserve", but neither makes her stupid or a Trump judge. In fact, her ruling in Trump I in favor of the special master request by Trump's lawyers, which she grounded in her airy question to Jack Smith, "Where's the harm?", demonstrated that she was quite the intellectual, she
"...thought like a pointy-headed appellate judge, not a commonsensical trial judge. A seasoned trial judge would have seen Trump’s request for a special master and quickly ruled, “Hell to the N-O.” Judge Cannon—a former appellate attorney, with limited trial experience—received Trump’s unorthodox request, identified novel legal issues, and thought to herself, “How interesting!” [Pause: when someone stands before a work of art, or reads a work Jacques Derrida and exclaims "How interesting!", he has no clue. Unpause] ;
that is, that she was "quite smart" topped off with a "weirdly clever, creative ruling..." No: not stupid or a Trump judge, Cannon was guilty of, at most, "Grossly overthinking" the matter. Cannon had taken a naked skeleton legal request and clothed it in rich raiment.
But then a panel of three of those "pointy-headed appellate judge[s]" "unceremoniously" undressed the skeleton, and Cannon, with alacrity and prejudice, leaving both legally naked and hideous-looking.
So Lat's characterizations of her are...unsupported by the record as lawyers say.
So, "What went wrong?", Lat asks. To this outside observer it is perfectly clear what went wrong: this Trump judge in the sleepy hinterland of Fort Pierce, Florida, whose criminal trial experience "consisted almost entirely of a few categories of cases: distribution of a controlled substance, illegal reentry of people who had previously been deported, felons in possession of firearms and child pornography or trafficking", suddenly had a case involving her patron as her very own pet project in loyalty ideological conformity and ruled consistent with those interests and against the law.
To Lat, Cannon's judicial career can be cleaved into "Pre-Trump" sunshine and "Post-Trump" darkness. Of course it can be. Cannon's Trump I ruling was a cranial x-ray that revealed to the legal community and the community at large a bone in her brain. Her reputation was smeared, her IQ questioned, and, most importantly, her legal soul was revealed: Trump judge.
The random assignment to her of Trump II, the docs case, is where the heavens close around Cannon. Lat puts this down to the Trial of the Clerks. Her reversal in Trump I had made her a judicial clerkship third rail. The bright young things didn't want to clerk with Loose Cannon anymore; those who were there left. Those who stayed, or who came with misgivings, were treated badly. Cannon became clerk-poor both in quantity and quality.
I call bullshit on Lat there. This article was published on March 22. That's four days after Cannon's now equally infamous jury instruction Order. To state the obvious all judicial rulings are the judge's, not his/her clerks, no matter the legwork of the clerks. This order is barely two pages long; it easily could have been knocked out by her alone, or dictated to a secretary. There is no citation to legal authority. It is about as simple to draft and execute as can be. In fact, Lat quotes a review by a clerk who worked for her in the second half of 2023 that Cannon was "micromanaging everything". Cannon drafted that Order herself.
Trump II, Lat writes, consumed Cannon with "anxiety" and "insecurity". Of course it would. The Trump docs case is as simple, as open-and-shut, as those felon-in-possession cases that were Cannon's pre-Trump judicial fodder. He was as obviously guilty as the felon in possession. How was she going to get him out of that? Well, we have seen, haven't we?
Lat though, like Cannon, sees fathomless depth in a shallow stream where the bed can be seen from shore by Mr. Magoo. The docs case is "super-complex", "one of the...most complex" in the country, so complex evidently, that "quite smart" Cannon can't keep it in chronological order. Jury instructions last; evidentiary rulings before.
What we outside observers thought of Judge Cannon, that she was obtuse and a Trump hack, is true. What David Lat writes about her, that she is "quite smart" is also true. Smart enough to cover her tracks as a Trump hack? "Hell to the N-O".
*I hereby extend some unsought advice to David Lat. I have pretty considerable experience in this blog at anonymizing people. With stakes far higher than Lat's sources and clerks will ever face, and the chances of discovery literally approaching one in a billion, I went to extreme lengths to protect the identify of those who cooperated with me in my China writing: obviously not naming them or even in some cases not pseudonymizing them; without changing the substance in the slightest, I changed their style of writing, their grammar, in case anything about them could be gleaned by study of their written words; I switched their genders or neutered them; put them in China when they lived in the States or elsewhere, and vice versa; wrote that they saw things that they heard about and heard things that they eyewitnessed. I protected them at cost of everything except the truth of what they communicated to me. Mr. Lat has a far less set of dangers but also a far more limited universe of sources: one judge, a woman, and two to four clerks at a time, a total of, I don't know, 15-20 people? Some of whom (those who had good things to say about clerking for Loose Cannon) Mr. Lat identifies by name, which of course narrows the universe of possibilities for the others who were critical. He identifies the clerks whose names he does not use by gender, female. He gives them female pseudonyms; he reveals that one of them was about to give birth. I would bet there are hundreds of people, including Judge Cannon, from whom Lat wants to protect them from, who know exactly who the new mother is. I would have left out that detail, I would have switched every clerk's gender, I would have done everything I could to misdirect speculation. Lat hides them behind a transparent fig leaf.
