CREW amicus

A watchdog group is asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from overseeing former President Trump’s classified documents case.

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The CREW brief asks for the documents case to be reassigned to another jurist in South Florida. Smith did not make that request, but the 11th Circuit could independently determine the rare move is warranted.

“Even before she dismissed this case on novel and insupportable grounds that ignored both statutory authority and Supreme Court precedent, Judge Cannon’s other extraordinary rulings and sluggish administration of the case had provoked well-founded concerns that she might be biased against the Government’s case and unable to manage that case impartially,” CREW wrote in its motion to file a friend-of-the-court brief filed late Tuesday.

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“If the Court reverses Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling in this matter, it will be the third time in under three years that it has had to do so in a seemingly straightforward case about a former president’s unauthorized possession of government documents,” CREW wrote.

“But citing the mere number and frequency of reversals does not fully capture the problem; for some of Judge Cannon’s rulings have been so unprecedented that affirming them would, in this Court’s words, ‘violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.’”

  The Hill

The brief