Aileen Cannon Makes Jack Smith's Case More Complicated

Special Counsel Jack Smith's documents case against former President Donald Trump has been handed a new hurdle from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

Trump is facing 40 federal felony charges related to his post-presidency retention of classified documents and alleged attempts to obstruct the government's efforts to retrieve them. The former president, who was convicted on 34 unrelated felony counts in New York last month, has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the documents case, announced in a ruling on Thursday that she would soon schedule a new hearing to revisit a decision that a different federal judge made allowing Smith's team to use evidence obtained from one of Trump's former lawyers.

In March 2023, months before Trump's indictment in the documents case, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that prosecutors could use evidence taken from then-Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran under a legal doctrine known as the crime-fraud exception, which allows attorney-client privilege to be breached.

Alongside the documents retrieved during the August 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago, the evidence that prosecutors obtained from Corcoran forms an important component of Smith's case against Trump.

Cannon wrote in her decision that it was "the obligation of this Court to make factual findings afresh on the crime-fraud issue," while arguing that the "standard means by which to make such findings" is by holding "an evidentiary hearing at which both sides can present evidence."

Smith's team had urged Cannon to avoid holding the hearing over concerns that it would become a time-wasting "mini-trial." The judge dismissed those concerns, writing that "there is a difference between a resource-wasting and delay-producing 'mini-trial'" and "an evidentiary hearing geared to adjudicating the contested factual and legal issues."

Newsweek reached out for comment to Smith's office via email on Thursday.

Cannon has frequently been accused of having a pro-Trump bias due to a series of decisions that seem to benefit the former president and his legal strategy of delaying criminal proceedings. The federal charges against Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee in this year's presidential election, will almost certainly be dropped if he wins in November.

However, Cannon's ruling on Thursday was not entirely beneficial for the former president, as she also denied a request from Trump's lawyers to hold a "Franks" hearing—a legal proceeding to challenge the warrant used in the Mar-a-Lago raid based on claims of falsified information.

In the ruling, Cannon argued that Trump's team had failed to prove the warrant was based on "any material false statements or omissions," writing that they had identified "four omissions in the warrant, but none of the omitted information—even if added to the affidavit in support of the warrant—would have defeated a finding of probable cause."