Trump’s legal team has filed a stream of long-shot arguments, and the number of unresolved issues is piling up, with no trial date in sight. …

Complicated case, unusual circumstances

Cannon, 43 years old, has presided over the case since Smith charged Trump last June, alleging that he held on to sensitive government secrets, shared them with others and directed his staff to help him evade authorities’ efforts to retrieve them. The case presents a potent trifecta: a former president as the defendant, classified government secrets as evidence, and the glare of public scrutiny.

The highest-profile case in South Florida is playing out somewhat improbably in Fort Pierce, where Cannon sits as the only district judge in a gleaming white courthouse that hulks over the slow-paced downtown. …

Without colleagues down the hall, Cannon also lacks routine, informal interactions with longer-tenured jurists who might have provided mentorship, lawyers who practice in the district said. …

Cannon also lost a law clerk who quit midterm, a move that is rare for young lawyers who take on the prestigious posts for a year after finishing law school. …

Big jump to the bench

Trump nominated Cannon, a graduate of Duke University and the University of Michigan Law School, to the federal bench during the last year of his presidency. The Senate confirmed her in a 56-21 vote shortly after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. …

… She joined the conservative Federalist Society while in law school, and after graduation, did a three-year stint in private practice before becoming an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida. … She spent most of her years as a government attorney working on appeals, defending criminal convictions and sentences.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio contacted her in 2019 to express interest in considering her for a judicial seat. She was nominated at age 39. Her selection surprised some in the South Florida legal community, where she was viewed as having less trial experience than a typical nominee for district court. …

Frustration runs both ways

Cannon was under scrutiny even before she was assigned the Trump prosecution. During the government’s investigation, she oversaw a civil lawsuit the former president brought over the FBI’s search of his South Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where agents found classified documents. Cannon granted Trump’s request for a third-party review of the recovered documents, disrupting the investigation until a three-judge appeals panel overturned her.

The panel unanimously rebuked Cannon’s legal reasoning and said there was no justification for treating Trump differently from any other target of a search warrant.

Cannon has a formal, all-business approach in her courtroom, and can be prickly with both prosecutors and defense lawyers, lawyers in South Florida said. …

In the Trump case, Cannon’s frustration has been most visible with prosecutors. Last year, she scolded prosecutors for “frankly wasting the court’s time” by raising arguments at a hearing that they hadn’t previously made in court filings. …

Tensions recently emerged anew when prosecutors asked Cannon to issue a gag order barring Trump from making statements that could endanger law-enforcement agents involved in the case.

Cannon initially denied the request on procedural grounds, saying prosecutors hadn’t shown the “professional courtesy” of adequately conferring with Trump’s lawyers in advance.

Prosecutors later doubled down on the request, which Cannon will consider Monday.

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(Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66881638)