Politics

Even before her bombshell decision on Monday to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, Judge Aileen M. Cannon had made any number of unorthodox rulings.

In fact, since Judge Cannon took control of the case in June 2023, many of her decisions have been so outside the norm that they have fueled intense criticism of her legal acumen, stoked questions about favoritism toward Mr. Trump and slowed the documents case sufficiently that it would not come to trial before Election Day.

Still, almost no one, including some defense lawyers working on the case, expected Judge Cannon to throw out the charges against Mr. Trump by ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job — especially on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

The ruling upended 25 years of Justice Department procedure for naming and governing special counsels and called into question decisions by previous courts reaching back to the Watergate era.

“The very definition of an activist judge, she has single-handedly upended three decades of established law historically used fairly and in a bipartisan manner,” said Joëlle Anne Moreno, a law professor at Florida International University.

From the moment that Judge Cannon was assigned to the case, there were questions about her ability to handle it. She took control of one of the most significant prosecutions in American history, rife with legal and political complexities, even though she had been a judge for less than four years and had extremely limited experience in overseeing criminal trials.

On top of all that, the main defendant was the president who had nominated her to the federal bench.

Her colleagues in the Southern District of Florida were concerned enough about her stewardship of the case that not just one, but two of them approached her early in her tenure and asked her to consider stepping back and handing off the matter to another federal judge.

One of the jurists — the chief judge of the district — suggested it would be inappropriate for Judge Cannon to continue on the case because of a ruling she had made in Mr. Trump’s favor in a related civil case after the F.B.I. had searched Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022.

In a move that drew national scrutiny and criticism, Judge Cannon intervened in the civil case and barred the Justice Department from using any of the documents that agents seized from Mar-a-Lago in their inquiry until an independent arbiter had sorted through them for any that were privileged.

That decision was quickly reversed in a stinging ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which said she never had legal authority to get involved in the first place.

Over and over, throughout her handling of the documents case in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon has made similarly unusual decisions, often showing a willingness to grant a serious audience to some of the former president’s most far-fetched defense claims.

She has also repeatedly scheduled hearings in court to debate issues that many federal judges would have dealt with on the merits of written filings alone. And that has made it all but certain that the case will not reach a jury until well after the election in November — one of Mr. Trump’s overarching legal and political objectives.

Many legal experts questioned Judge Cannon’s decision to hold a hearing last month on the issue of Mr. Smith’s appointment, arguing that several courts reaching back to the Watergate era had already upheld the legality of independent prosecutors.

The hearing was even odder, the experts pointed out, because the judge allowed outside parties who had filed friend-of-the-court briefs to address her directly for up to 30 minutes — a practice that rarely takes place at the trial level and is more common in appellate-level courts like the Supreme Court.

Entertaining direct arguments from these outside parties was a signal that she was taking Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss on the appointments question seriously, Joel S. Johnson, an associate professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, said last month before the hearing.

Judge Cannon has her defenders. She approached the question of the constitutionality of the special counsel appointment with the thorough preparation of a circuit judge, said Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who argued against the legality of the special counsel before her at the hearing last month.

“I’ve rarely seen a district court judge this well prepared,” Mr. Blackman said. “She knew the cases, she knew the statutes and I suspect she had already written most of that opinion already.”

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section, said that even though Judge Cannon’s ruling on Monday was unusual and rejected by other judges, it is also defensible in the context of recent Supreme Court decisions.

He cited the court’s decision granting Mr. Trump substantial immunity for actions he took in office and other decisions as “legal doctrine that upsets settled principles on separations of power and presidential accountability.” In a concurring opinion in the immunity decision, Justice Clarence Thomas had called for re-examining the legality of the appointment of special counsels.

But the hearing and decision on Mr. Smith’s appointment were hardly the only unusual moves by Judge Cannon.

In one of the more striking aspects of her handling of the case, Judge Cannon has ignored a common practice in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits, of trial judges passing off routine motions to the magistrate judge attached to a case.

Judge Cannon has not delegated any motions to the magistrate judge in this case, Bruce E. Reinhart. And Judge Reinhart knows the case well: He approved the search warrant used by the F.B.I. two years ago when agents descended on Mar-a-Lago and hauled away a trove of classified material that is central to the case.

This spring, in another unusual move, Judge Cannon ordered the defense and the prosecution to write dueling instructions for the jury that seemed to take for granted one of Mr. Trump’s most far-fetched defense claims: that he could not be tried for holding on to a trove of classified documents because he had designated the materials in question to be his own personal property under a law known as the Presidential Records Act.

By appearing to adopt the former president’s contentious position on the act, Judge Cannon seemed to be nudging any eventual jurors toward acquitting Mr. Trump or even leaving open the possibility that she herself could acquit the former president near the end of the proceeding by declaring that the government had failed to prove its case.

“I have never seen a case where one would contemplate giving the jury alternative instructions: ‘Decide the case on this hypothetical scenario and then answer the question in an alternative understanding of the law,’” said Margaret Kwoka, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Judge Cannon has rarely issued rulings in the documents case that have been longer than 15 or 20 pages, and has often made decisions without revealing much about her legal reasoning.

But her order on Monday dismissing the case because of Mr. Smith’s appointment was 93 pages and full of a sweeping tour of historical events reaching back through the Watergate affair to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s.

“It’s significant that this 90-plus-page decision is more erudite with more traditional citations than some of Judge Cannon’s other opinions,” said Mr. Butler, the former federal prosecutor.

Frustrations with Judge Cannon have been mounting for months among members of Mr. Smith’s team, including one of his top deputies, David Harbach, who has twice lost his temper with the judge during hearings in her courtroom.

It is likely that prosecutors will appeal this ruling in particular to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which issued the rebuke against Judge Cannon two years ago over her decision about a special master.

Alan Morrison, a professor at George Washington Law School, said the order to dismiss the case on Monday may end up having a positive outcome for Mr. Smith.

“He can now take an appeal and when he prevails, he can ask the court to reassign the case to another judge,” Mr. Morrison said.

“Of course, it was clear a long time ago that she would never allow the case to be tried before Election Day — if ever,” Mr. Morrison added. “And so this order does nothing to impact the trial date adversely, in the real world.”

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Donald J. Trump’s newly chosen running mate, has made a shift from the Trump critic he was when he first entered politics to the loyalist he is today. It was a shift both in style and substance: Now, on topics as disparate as trade and Ukraine, Mr. Vance is closely aligned with Mr. Trump.

Here’s a look at where the senator stands on the issues that will most likely dominate the campaign ahead and, should Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance win in November, their years in the White House.

Abortion

Mr. Vance opposes abortion rights, even in the case of incest or rape, but says there should be exceptions for cases when the mother’s life is in danger. He praised the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. As he ran for Senate in 2022, a headline on the issues section of his campaign website read simply: “Ban Abortion.”

That said, Mr. Vance, like Mr. Trump, opposes a national abortion ban, saying the issue should now be left to the states. “Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said in an interview with USA Today Network in October 2022.

Ukraine

Mr. Vance has been one of the leading opponents of U.S. support for Ukraine in the war with Russia. “I think it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine,” he said in a podcast interview with Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser and longtime ally. “I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

He led the battle in the Senate, unsuccessfully, to block a $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine. “I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war,” he wrote in an opinion essay for The New York Times early this year challenging President Biden’s stance on the war. “Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.”

Immigration

Immigration was the subject of Mr. Vance’s first advertisements in his 2022 campaign for the Senate in Ohio. While most ads are written by consultants, Mr. Vance said he wrote this one himself: “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans,” he says, looking straight into the camera. “With more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Mr. Vance’s views on immigration largely echo Mr. Trump. He wants to finish construction of the border wall and proclaimed that he would “oppose every attempt to grant amnesty” to immigrants who arrived here illegally. He favors what he called a merit-based system for immigrants seeking to settle here.

Mr. Vance argues that undocumented immigrants are a source of cheap labor that undercuts wages for American-born workers in states like Ohio. “If you cannot hire illegal migrants to staff your hotels, then you have to go to one of the seven million prime-age American men who are out of the labor force and find some way to re-engage them.”

Jan. 6

“I think the election was stolen from Trump,” Mr. Vance said during the Republican primary for his Ohio seat, putting him firmly in the camp of election deniers. Mr. Vance dismissed the idea that Mr. Trump played a role in instigating the demonstrators who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he said that if he had been Mr. Trump’s vice president then, he would have bowed to Mr. Trump’s demand and rejected electoral votes from several swing states won by Mr. Biden in 2020.

And he is skeptical that former Vice President Mike Pence, who hid in a stairway as members of the mob streamed through the hallways, was in danger because he refused to block, in his role as president of the Senate, the vote validating Mr. Biden’s victory.

“I think politics and politics people like to really exaggerate things from time to time,” he said on CNN. “Look, Jan. 6 was a bad day. It was a riot. But the idea that Donald Trump endangered anyone’s lives when he told them to protest peacefully, it’s just absurd.”

Tariffs

Mr. Vance has called for “broad-based tariffs, especially on goods coming in from China,” because they pose an unfair threat to American jobs and commerce, he said. “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

In that stance, Mr. Vance is again largely in line with Mr. Trump, who has proposed a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on goods coming into the country. That idea has come under fire from Democrats and many economists, who warn that it would be inflationary. But Mr. Vance rejected the criticism as overblown.

He said in the CBS interview that applying tariffs is like saying “we’re going to penalize you for using slave labor in China and importing that stuff in the United States.” And, he added: “You end up making more stuff in America, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio and in Michigan.”

Climate

Mr. Vance has said climate change is not a threat and has said he is skeptical of the scientific consensus that warming of the earth’s atmosphere is caused by human activity. “It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia,” he told the American Leadership Forum. Mr. Vance is a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry — which is dominant in his home state — and has voiced opposition to wind and solar energy, and electric vehicles.

Middle East

Mr. Vance has been a steadfast supporter of Israel throughout the country’s war in Gaza, defending its wartime policies in the face of growing criticism over the civilian death toll.

When members of the Senate considered a bill providing military aide to both Israel and Ukraine, Mr. Vance led a group of senators proposing legislation to send money only to Israel. Echoing the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he said the country needed to eliminate Hamas after the terrorist group’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“Israel has an achievable objective,” Mr. Vance wrote in a memo he circulated among Senate Republicans before introducing the bill. “Ukraine does not.”

Mr. Vance assailed President Biden for delaying the shipment of weapons to Israel as tensions grew between the White House and Mr. Netanyahu’s government.

He acknowledged the civilian casualties in Gaza — “our heart certainly goes out to them,” he said — but he maintained that the blame for that lies not with Israel, but with Hamas.

Former President Donald J. Trump has chosen Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio to be his running mate, wagering that the young senator will bring fresh energy to the Republican ticket and ensure that the movement Mr. Trump began nearly a decade ago can live on after him.

Mr. Vance, 39, is a political newcomer who entered the Senate only last year, but he has spent that time methodically ascending the conservative firmament. Once an acerbic Trump critic — attacking Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and calling him “cultural heroin” — he won Mr. Trump’s backing in his 2022 Senate race by wholly embracing his politics and his lies about a stolen election. The endorsement lifted him above a crowded field, and ultimately to the Senate.

Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who became best known for writing the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” did not forget it. He quickly emerged as a top defender of the former president in the halls of Congress and on television, taking his cues from Mr. Trump while frequently bucking the priorities of Senator Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s longtime Republican leader.

Mr. Trump announced his choice in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Monday, as the Republican National Convention was getting underway in Milwaukee. He said that Mr. Vance was “the person best suited” to be his potential vice president. He highlighted Mr. Vance’s time in the Marine Corps and his memoir, saying he believed Mr. Vance was a champion for hardworking people, particularly the workers and farmers in a number of key swing states.

Mr. Trump’s selection came just days after he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, an episode that underlined the significance of his choosing a running mate who might be in line as Mr. Trump’s successor.

Mr. Vance, an ardent and vocal defender of Mr. Trump, went further than many of his allies, directly attributing the shooting to the rhetoric of President Biden and his campaign, even as Mr. Trump and his campaign called for unity.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” Mr. Vance wrote on X.

In Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump has tapped an ambitious ideologue who relishes the spotlight and has already shown he can energize donors on behalf of the presumptive nominee. His youth — there are nearly 40 years separating them, and Mr. Vance is the first millennial nominated to a major-party ticket — could prove a boon to the ticket, as voters have expressed concern over both Mr. Trump’s and President Biden’s ages. And the choice positions Mr. Vance, intentionally or not, as the likeliest Republican yet to carry Mr. Trump’s ideological legacy beyond a potential second term in the White House.

Mr. Vance achieved renown after the publication in 2016 of “Hillbilly Elegy,” about growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky. The timing dovetailed with Mr. Trump’s political rise, and Mr. Vance, then a “Never Trump” conservative, became sought out for his perspective on what fueled Mr. Trump’s popularity among white working-class voters.

At the time, Mr. Vance argued that Mr. Trump was guiding “the white working class to a very dark place,” particularly over his offensive remarks about immigration and his efforts to blame immigrants for economic woes. He once told a former classmate at Yale that he thought Mr. Trump was “America’s Hitler.”

But Mr. Vance said his views shifted during the Trump presidency. And by the time he entered the Republican primary for a Senate seat in Ohio in 2021, he had adopted Mr. Trump’s hard-right messaging and renounced his previous views about immigration and trade.

Three weeks before the primary, Mr. Trump rewarded his conversion with an endorsement that carried Mr. Vance to victory in a crowded primary. And in the Senate, Mr. Vance’s adherence to Trumpism stood out among his peers.

Yet the two men’s similarities could prove a drawback. Mr. Vance has rooted his career in speaking for the working class against elites, but in aligning himself so squarely with Mr. Trump, it is unclear whether he can bring voters to the table who are not already on board. Mr. Vance is in lock step with Mr. Trump on nearly every issue, and he may not have much to offer more moderate or independent voters unenthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s policies or turned off by his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Mr. Biden, in a social media post, criticized Mr. Vance as only pretending to be a champion for ordinary Americans. “He talks a big game about working people,” Mr. Biden wrote. “But now, he and Trump want to raise taxes on middle-class families while pushing more tax cuts for the rich.”

Mr. Trump’s choice of Mr. Vance capped months of feverish running-mate speculation — and followed an intense anti-Vance lobbying effort that tried to get the former president to pick other top contenders such as Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Some of those pressuring Mr. Trump to not select Mr. Vance included major Republican donors and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media mogul.

The other politicians considered in the top tier of candidates for Mr. Trump’s running mate had competed against him in Republican presidential primaries: Mr. Rubio ran against him in 2016, and Mr. Burgum and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, another name long in the mix, both ran in the primary this year.

Compared with other possible selections, Mr. Vance has relatively little governing experience should he ascend to the presidency. But he has never directly competed against Mr. Trump, and his political career exemplifies how devotion to Mr. Trump has practically become a precondition in Republican politics.

Embracing Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, similarly, proved a key loyalty litmus test for any candidate angling for the vice-presidential slot. More than any other top contender for a spot on the ticket, Mr. Vance has endorsed and promoted Mr. Trump’s lies that the election was stolen. Unlike Mr. Rubio or Mr. Scott, who both voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory after the police had managed to clear the Capitol of rioters on Jan. 6, Mr. Vance was not in the Senate then and did not have to put his position on the record.

Mr. Vance is part of a group of roughly a dozen Republican senators who have tried to push the Senate toward Mr. Trump’s MAGA ideology, particularly with isolationist views on foreign policy. He unsuccessfully clashed with Mr. McConnell to block a foreign aid package that provided $61 billion to Ukraine and repeatedly opposed efforts to avert a government shutdown.

During his frequent television interviews this year, and as he has hit the campaign trail for Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance has echoed the former president’s hard-line views on immigration and his stance on trade.

In addition to his news media appearances defending Mr. Trump, which The New York Times has reported played a role in the selection process, Mr. Vance also notably joined Mr. Trump’s entourage during his criminal trial in Manhattan in May. Outside the courthouse, he held a news conference attacking the prosecution’s star witness, Michael D. Cohen, while Mr. Trump was bound by a gag order that prohibited him from doing so.

Raised largely by his maternal grandparents, Mr. Vance, whose mother battled drug addiction, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a steel mill town which saw its fortunes decline as blue-collar jobs disappeared. After enlisting in the Marines and doing public affairs work in Iraq, Mr. Vance graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University, then went on to Yale Law School.

Mr. Vance met his wife, Usha Vance, at Yale, and the two have three children. After time working in corporate law, Mr. Vance went to San Francisco, where he worked as a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel, a well-known conservative donor who influenced Mr. Vance’s politics and who helped support his Senate race.

Democrats are likely to attack Mr. Vance over previous comments on abortion, one of the few places where he and Mr. Trump have diverged. Mr. Vance, during his Senate run, suggested he did not believe in exceptions to abortion restrictions in cases of rape or incest and said he would support a 15-week federal abortion ban that had been proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Mr. Vance has more recently taken a softer stance, echoing Mr. Trump’s belief that abortion decisions must be left to the states, and that Republicans must soften their demands for abortion restrictions in order to win elections.

And though Mr. Vance’s fealty to Mr. Trump may have been an asset in the race for running mate — loyalty is a quality Mr. Trump values above most others — it could pose a political threat in November. Mr. Biden and his campaign have been attacking Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy and are eager to remind voters about his 2020 election lies and his role in spurring supporters to storm the Capitol to overturn the election.

In news media appearances, Mr. Vance has echoed Mr. Trump’s widely debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In an interview with ABC News this year, he backed schemes to create alternative slates of electors in key battleground states that Mr. Trump lost, saying, “We needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”

More recently, Mr. Vance has maintained that Mr. Trump had legitimate grievances over how the election was conducted, even as most of Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud have been debunked. And he has said that if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have encouraged Congress to consider false slates of pro-Trump electors before certifying the election.

Mr. Trump’s vice president at the time, Mike Pence, bucked Mr. Trump’s calls to reject Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020. After Mr. Trump publicly criticized his vice president’s refusal as disloyal, some Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol chanted threats to hang Mr. Pence, who was forced to flee the mob, which had come within 40 feet of him.

But Mr. Vance told CNN this year that he was “extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger.”

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, the newly announced running mate to former President Donald J. Trump, has gone on a rapid journey over the past eight years from best-selling author and outspoken Trump critic to one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders and, now, his would-be second in command.

Before running for office, Mr. Vance, 39, was known as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir recounting his upbringing in a poor family that also served as a sort of sociological examination of white working-class Americans. The book was published the summer before Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, and many readers looked to it after his victory as a sort of guide to understanding Mr. Trump’s support among white working-class communities.

Mr. Vance himself harshly denounced Mr. Trump during his 2016 campaign. But by 2022, he had embraced Mr. Trump, winning a crowded Republican Senate primary with his backing and becoming a reliable pro-Trump voice in Congress.

Here is more on Mr. Vance’s background and views.

• Personal background: He was born in Middletown, Ohio, and spent part of his childhood in Jackson, Ky., raised by his maternal grandparents as his mother struggled with drug addiction, before returning to Middletown. After high school, he enlisted in the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, doing public affairs work. He later attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School.

• Career in finance: Mr. Vance worked for the conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel before founding his own venture capital firm. Mr. Thiel donated millions of dollars to Mr. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign.

• “Hillbilly Elegy”: The timing of his book, published the year that Mr. Trump was elected, helped raise his profile. He argued that a lack of personal agency was responsible for economic suffering, drug abuse and other struggles in white working-class communities like his, and wrote of “a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” Since aligning himself with Mr. Trump, he has turned his blame toward outside sources, like offshoring and immigration.

• Criticism of Trump: During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Vance sharply criticized Mr. Trump, describing him as “cultural heroin” and as a demagogue who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” He described himself as “a Never Trump guy.” In a Twitter post that he has since deleted, he called Mr. Trump “reprehensible” because he “makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc.”

• Senate campaign: After deciding to run for Senate in 2022, he recast himself as an unflinching Trump supporter. Mr. Vance apologized for denouncing Mr. Trump, adopted his hard-line stances on immigration and other issues, and won Mr. Trump’s endorsement. He has said that Mr. Trump’s term in the White House proved his opposition wrong. He also said in 2019 that “Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially” because of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, during which the judge — whom Mr. Trump had nominated, and for whom Mr. Vance’s wife had clerked — was accused of sexual assault.

• Election denial: He has not committed to accepting the results of this year’s election. “If we have a free and fair election, I will accept the results,” he said on CNN in May. It’s a caveat that many Republicans have used, leaving the door open to the notion of foul play and helping to sow doubt in advance. In February, he told ABC News that if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would not have certified the election as Mike Pence did, but would have “told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.”

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.