WASHINGTON Three years after being appointed by former US President Donald Trump, Judge Aileen Cannon will preside over and manage Trump's appearance in federal court in South Florida next Tuesday.

Trump nominated the judge, who is known to be close to the Republican Party, as she has donated several times to the party's nominees in the state, in federal court for the Southern District of Florida in April 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment months later.

Cannon's presence as a judge in the case, even if limited to preliminary proceedings, is likely to raise much speculation about conflicts of interest and the impartiality of the court.

Judge Cannon has previously slowed down the Justice Department's investigation into Trump's wrongdoing, in one case barring prosecutors from using classified documents they seized from Trump's home, and in another case appointing a special expert on the case and tasking him with assessing whether the documents are consistent with Trump's claims that the documents may be covered by executive privilege.

Judge Cannon slowed Justice Department's investigation into Trump's wrongdoing (US press)

Republican judge. Same to you!

Trump nominated Cannon to the federal court for the Southern District, then an assistant attorney general in the Southern District Office of Florida, where she worked in the Criminal Division of Appeals, and then confirmed her appointment to the Senate in November 2020 by a vote of 56 to 21, and 12 Democratic senators voted for her.

Cannon has been a member of the Federal Assembly since 2005, according to a judicial nomination questionnaire she submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2020, and is made up of conservative lawyers, independents, law students, and academics.

Cannon said she joined the federal association when she was a student at the University of Michigan Law School, and was asked during the confirmation process why she joined the group, to which she replied, "I did so because I enjoyed the diversity of legal perspectives discussed at the federal assembly meetings and events."

"I also found the organization's discussions about the constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law and the limited role of the judiciary to say what the law is, not the law."

Questionable decision

In September, Judge Cannon granted the Trump team's request to appoint an independent expert to examine material recovered by the FBI during a search last August from his home in the Mar-a-Lago resort.

Cannon made the divisive decision after hearing arguments from President Trump's lawyers against attorneys from the Justice Department, who said the former president's claims of privilege were unjustified.

But the Trump legal team failed to meet the multiple tests required to show that the government abused its power by searching Trump's home, and the court rejected the former president's claims, especially his claim that he had the right to keep them because of his executive decision not to continue classifying them as classified documents.

BREAKING: CNN drops bombshell, reveals that Judge Aileen Cannon was just appointed to oversee the federal case against Trump — the same judge who appointed the "Special Master" to slow down the federal examination of the evidence the FBI seized in Mar-a-Lago.

But it gets WORSE...... pic.twitter.com/8GvrLUXPTx

— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) June 9, 2023

Cuba to South Florida

Born to an immigrant Cuban mother and American father, Aileen Cannon was born in California in 1981, and after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University in North Carolina in 2003 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan School of Law in 2007, she served as a clerk for the Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Des Moines, Iowa for a year.

She then moved to Washington, D.C. to be an assistant attorney at a corporate law firm, where she worked for 3 years, before getting a job as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Judge Eileen Cannon married Josh Lawrence, a Florida restaurateur in 2008, with two children living in Vero Beach, a suburb of Miami, Florida, as of 2022, registered as a Republican in the state's voter registry, and previously donated to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' campaign in the 2018 election.