Trump-Appointed Judge Aileen Cannon Will Handle Documents Case

This article was updated to reflect more detailed information about the usual procedure in the Southern District of Florida for assigning cases to judges.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal indictment on charges stemming from his handling of classified documents will be overseen — at least initially — by a federal judge whom a higher court criticized for a series of rulings that were unusually favorable to Mr. Trump during the early stages of the investigation, according to five people familiar with the matter.

The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who Mr. Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, is scheduled to preside over the former president’s first appearance in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday, the people said. In general, judges who handle initial appearances, go on to preside at further proceeding. But it was not clear whether Judge Cannon would remain assigned for the entirety of Mr. Trump’s case.

Judge Cannon’s involvement was earlier reported by ABC News.

Angela Noble, the chief clerk of court for the Southern District of Florida, said in an email exchange with The New York Times last fall that new cases are randomly assigned among the judges in the district, rather than automatically assigned to a judge who has heard a related matter.

The chances that Judge Cannon would randomly receive the assignment were low.

Normally, the district assigns new cases to judges who sit in the divisions where the matters originated or adjoining ones. Mar-a-Lago is in the West Palm Beach division, between Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale. Seven active judges have chambers in those three divisions, as do three on senior status who still hear cases‌.

Ms. Noble also pointed to a rule that allows either party in a new case to ask for a case to be transferred to another judge who is already overseeing a similar and related matter that is still pending, to avoid unnecessary overlap. But Mr. Trump’s earlier lawsuit is no longer pending before Judge Cannon.

Last fall, she presided over an unusual and highly contentious legal battle between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s lawyers over whether to pause the documents investigation so that an outside arbiter could review thousands of records seized by the F.B.I. from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.

Ruling for Mr. Trump, Judge Cannon effectively froze a significant portion of the government’s inquiry, barring prosecutors from using the materials seized from Mar-a-Lago for any “investigative purpose” connected to the case against Mr. Trump until the work of the arbiter, known as a special master, was finished.

An appeals court sitting in Atlanta ultimately overruled Judge Cannon, scrapped the special master’s review and allowed the investigation of Mr. Trump to resume unhindered.

In a sharply critical decision, a three-member panel of the appeals court said Judge Cannon never had the proper jurisdiction to intervene in the case and order the review. The court also chided her for stopping federal investigators from using the files seized from Mar-a-Lago, saying there was no justification for treating Mr. Trump differently from any other target of a search warrant.

“It is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president — but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation,” the court wrote.