The Daily Beast: Inside One ‘Egregious’ Mistake From Trump’s Florida Judge Aileen Cannon

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whose pro-Trump bias and head-turning errors have raised questions about whether she should be overseeing former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida, made what appears to be another surprising mistake last year.

Now, a defense lawyer is seizing on her misstep to try freeing his client from prison—even though he was caught on tape violently throwing a courtroom chair at a prosecutor and threatening to kill him.

The blunder was simple and entirely avoidable. The federal judge told jurors they could find the man, Christopher Wilkins, “guilty or not guilty.” But then she handed jurors a verdict form that didn’t even have those options.

“How far does somebody have to go to school to say that a verdict form is supposed to say guilty and not guilty?” asked defense lawyer Jeffrey Garland. “That would be one of the more egregious versions of jury instruction error… it’s such a rare error.”

Cannon’s short and controversial history on the bench is under a microscope, given that she is presiding over such an historic criminal trial: that of a former president facing prison time for mishandling classified records at Mar-a-Lago and lying to the feds in a coverup. Trump himself appointed her in his final months in office, yet she has not recused herself from the case.

Cannon first came to people’s attention last year, when Trump’s lawyers were chastened by a judge who accused them of trying to game the judicial assignment system in a brazen attempt to have her oversee a conspiracy-laden lawsuit against political rival Hillary Clinton.

But she gained notoriety when Trump sued to block the feds from investigating Mar-a-Lago and she was oddly assigned the case, despite being in a distant corner of the district far from Trump’s mansion. Cannon immediately began to issue bizarre orders that froze the investigation—until appellate judges told her to back off. A court screwup even exposed how she was bending over backwards to appease the man who appointed her.

But now she’s come under fire over her inexperience.
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