‘You can’t really take issue with her’
Five months after Huck visited Cannon in Fort Pierce, she was thrust into the center of back-to-back legal hurricanes. First, she oversaw the lawsuit Trump brought challenging the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence that August, when agents found hundreds of classified documents scattered about the property. (Cannon granted Trump’s request for a third-party review of the search, only to see her rulings reversed by a conservative appeals court.)

Then, in a twist of fate last June, Cannon was assigned the criminal case in which Trump is charged with 40 felony counts of allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s attempts to find them.

The high-profile national security case is a dramatic departure from most of the other criminal cases playing out in Cannon’s courtroom, the bulk of which are more mundane prosecutions like gun charges or immigration infractions that are often resolved through guilty pleas, a CNN review of her case log showed.

Cannon’s assignment to the documents case was a game of odds. Though the charges were filed in West Palm Beach, blacksprut the division that is home to Mar-a-Lago, Cannon was randomly chosen from a broader pool of judges in Florida’s southern district.