Editor’s letter

The trial of a politician is bound to appear, well, political. With Trump now charged under the Espionage Act, supporters and detractors alike wonder whether he can possibly get a fair trial. MAGA Republicans see the process as inherently unfair, because the Justice Department is currently under a Democratic administration—but by that logic, no politician could ever be prosecuted by appointees of the other party. Critics of Trump, who include most Democrats but also many Republicans and independents, worry that the judge overseeing his trial, Aileen Cannon, will tip the scales of justice in his favor. And that fear has merit.

Simply being a Trump appointee isn’t cause for recusal. But Judge Cannon is no ordinary Trump appointee. She’s an extremely inexperienced one who has already proved herself shockingly biased toward the former president. When she first ruled on the case of the classified documents, she claimed that Trump should get special treatment because, as a public figure, the potential damage to his reputation would be “of a decidedly different order of magnitude” than it would for a mere ordinary American. This was too much even for the conservative 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which blasted her legal reasoning as it threw out her ruling. Citing more than a dozen errors in her argument, the three-judge panel said Cannon’s approach “would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations”—and added that she didn’t even have jurisdiction and should never have inserted herself into the investigation in the first place. While Cannon is not likely to simply quash the case, what if she used her authority to exclude certain evidence or to facilitate Trump supporters ending up on the jury? If Trump is found guilty, some Republicans will never accept the verdict as just but will insist the prosecution was political. If he’s acquitted with help from Cannon’s rulings, though, it’s Democrats who will see the courts as corrupted.