A year removed from its dismissal in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, President Donald Trump’s classified documents case is little more than a distant memory. What stands out, however, was how the prosecution moved at a snail’s pace, facilitated by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s drawn-out deadlines — and tolerance of Trump team efforts to delay — that at least created the appearance that she was slow-walking the case. Her handling of another, more recent Trump-related legal matter, however, suggests that she is capable of handling complex cases promptly and efficiently.
“When you go back to the Mar-a-Lago documents case, it really did look like she was walking the case slow, was giving Trump absolutely every benefit of the doubt that she could give in terms of his lawyers,” David Schultz, a Hamline University professor of legal studies and political science, told Salon.
But Cannon’s handling of the prosecution of Trump’s would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, is proceeding at a quite different pace. In that case, which began with Routh’s arraignment in late September 2024, Cannon’s decisions on motions have been timely and even-handed, with rulings following as quickly as two weeks after the last related filing was submitted, and, aside from two requests for delay granted in part, the case progressing on time for its Sept. 8, 2025, trial date.
Taken together, Cannon’s handling of the Routh case appears to substantiate legal experts’ accusations of purposeful delay in the now-defunct Trump classified documents case.
In 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 40 counts over his post-presidency retention of classified documents and efforts to thwart the government’s attempts to retrieve them. Though the criminal case against Trump and two co-defendants started with consistent court dates and filing deadlines, it would eventually grind to a near-halt as Trump’s legal team submitted a bevy of motions seeking to delay the case — and Cannon, herself a Trump appointee, entertained them.
The prosecution dragged on in its pre-trial evidence sharing period, with Cannon striking the trial date from the calendar altogether in May 2024 on account of accumulating motions she had yet to rule on. It also struck several legal experts as strange, and then alarming, that she was considering questionable Trump legal arguments, such as the notion that he could designate classified records his personal property under the Presidential Records Act, or requesting that the parties submit proposed jury instructions on the matter well before discovery had gotten anywhere close to completion.
“Normally, you don’t talk about jury instructions until well into trial, and we don’t have a trial date, not a confirmed trial date yet. So the fact that she’s entertaining this nonsense, number one, doing it when she’s doing it, well before trial, and refusing to issue a final ruling on it — it’s just either bizarre or just outright biased depending on your view of things,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Salon last April.
Toward the end of the prosecution’s life, Cannon even allocated two days to a hearing on whether Smith’s appointment was invalid, also allowing for outside counsel to argue on Trump’s behalf, much to the dismay of many legal experts.
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By contrast, in the Routh case, “she’s proceeding the way you would normally expect a district court judge to proceed on criminal matters, except it seems to be even more accelerated,” Schultz said in a phone interview, noting that federal judges have notoriously heavy dockets. “The fact that she’s moving this one [in what] appears to be as quickly as she is seems unusual.”
Schultz said he would expect a routine federal case to take a couple of years from the time of the first hearing to its completion, and the Routh case is “moving much more rapidly than that.”
In Cannon’s defense, the classified documents case — one of the first she heard after being appointed to the bench — was complicated in both its scope and the sensitive nature of the materials at issue. Federal agents obtained dozens of boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago, including hundreds of pages of classified materials, ranging in sensitivity, that would need to be reviewed in a specified area with a court-appointed handler during discovery.
Still, the Routh case similarly involves a high volume of discovery, including hundreds of interviews and some level of classified information, as evidenced by the Classified Information Procedures Act proceedings in the docket.
Earlier this week, Routh also requested a hearing on his proposal to terminate his counsel and represent himself at trial, and Cannon held it just days later.
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Schultz added that Cannon’s accelerated pace in the Routh prosecution could also be indicative of her learning curve. With a few more years of judicial experience under her belt, she may have finally found her rhythm in deciding on motions, setting trial schedules and maintaining them. But that’s him “[playing] devil’s advocate.”
“I still think there is this, at the very least, appearance problem, just in terms of how she handled that case versus this one,” Schultz said.
The delays in the Smith case also haven’t stopped. In February, the Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University filed a motion to intervene in the case and rescind the order preventing the release of the second volume of special counsel Smith’s report. The court received responses from Trump’s former co-defendants and the government as well as the reply from the Knight Institute by the end of March. But more than 90 days from the filing date of the reply, the institute has yet to receive a ruling from Cannon, according to its latest filing on Monday.
For her part, Cannon previously denied in part an expedited motion from nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight seeking to intervene in the case and get clarification or dissolution of that order four days after its submission.
