Trump Judge Aileen Cannon is Just Doing What She Was Hired to Do

The GOP's judiciary project is bigger than one pissy legal case.

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On Monday, Federal Judge Aileen Cannon announced the pending appointment of a “special master” who will be tasked with combing through the thousands of documents recovered from former President Donald Trump by the Justice Department, and screening them for not only potential attorney-client privileged material, but also executive privilege content as well. The ruling, which Cannon telegraphed beforehand, is a significant capitulation to the former president’s legal efforts to squirm his way out of any consequences for having very obviously taken a bunch of highly classified documents from the White House, stuffing them in his desk drawer, and then acting dumb when the government came knocking to get its tuff back. As per Cannon’s ruling, the DOJ investigation into what Trump took and why is — at least for now — on hold.

Following Cannon’s decision (and her subsequent rejection of an amicus brief from Republican DOJ officials criticizing her decision), there’s been a whole lot of hand wringing and pearl clutching and general woe-is-us-ing from a host of legal pundits aghast at the obvious bullshit-ness of this all:

• “By appointing a special master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents, Judge Aileen Cannon gave Trump the special treatment he asked for—and undermined the values of her profession,” attorney Andrew Weissman, a former deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, wrote in The Atlantic. “I truly hoped Judge Cannon would adhere to the rule of law, but she in fact is now another illustration of the insidiousness of Trump and the Big Lie. And how he has infected formerly main stream Republicans,” he added on Twitter.

• “This ruling is preposterous,” law professor Steve Vladeck proclaimed on Twitter.. “Never thought I’d have to teach about ‘executive privilege’ as a basis for bringing a claim *against* the executive branch,” he continued.

• “To any lawyer with serious federal criminal court experience who is being honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even flimsier,” Duke University Law Professor Samuel Bell declared

• Former Obama administration figure turned corporate-slavery-defender Neal Katyal responded to the ruling by simply deeming it “crazytown.”

You get the picture. A lot of law-knowers are extremely upset at what is, per their expert legal opinions, a very bad ruling. Fine. Okay. To which I say: yeah, so?

Cannon, a Trump appointee, has spent her entire judicial career in the firmly conservative trenches of the legal system. As the New York Times notes, she clerked for Republican judges, moved onto corporate law, and finally assumed the bench herself in the final weeks of the Trump administration, claiming during her confirmation process that she’d been involved with the ultra-right wing “Federalist Society” since 2005. Her ruling here, no matter how “laughably bad” or “crazytown” it may be, is part and parcel of the broader conservative effort to dramatically reshape an entire branch of government into its own, ideologically driven tool. It doesn’t matter that the ruling is legally bogus, so long as there are enough conservative judges in various levels of power to keep Cannon’s decision in play, giving Trump enough time to shore up his defenses, both legal and political. Even if the ruling doesn’t ultimately stick, we’re still forced to consign any good-faith debate over the case itself to the stagnant underworld of appellate limbo for months, if not years, to come. Indeed, should the Justice Department appeal the ruling, the decision would head to the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, in which more than half of that court’s 11 available judges are, themselves, Trump appointees.

Put another way, the nit-picking, and line-by-line dismantling of Cannon’s ruling may someday be important-ish if and when the case is propelled further down the legal tubes. But agonizing over it now is ultimately an exercise in a very specific sort of futility that’s been the hallmark of Trump’s thus-far unbroken streak of “getting away with shit.” The more people expend energy on pointing out how the legal system is supposed to work, the more space it gives Trump to simply do whatever he wants, regardless. That’s what the Federalist Society’s ongoing takeover of the courts has really accomplished: it’s not only about winning this ruling or that — it’s about changing the playing field so much that everyone else is stuck playing nitpicky catch up, instead of actually meeting the threat of a hard right judiciary head on.

Major media outlets’ uniform criticism of Cannon’s ruling doesn’t change the fact that there’s still a prevailing cloud of “decorum” preventing those same outlets from stating the obvious: that Cannon is in no small part doing what she was hired to do by a broader movement of ideologues. Like Trump in some respects, Cannon is not an aberration, but an acute symptom and manifestation of something larger, and much more dangerous.