Judge Cannon’s New Allies Expose Trump’s Blatant Hypocrisy

After months of relentlessly attacking the judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money case, Fox News hosts are now donning the white hat to chastise those taking shots at the judge in his classified documents case.

On Tuesday’s episode of Outnumbered, hosts Kayleigh McEnany, Emily Compagno, and Harris Faulkner were up in arms, defending Judge Aileen Cannon, whom many have criticized as helping the former president worm his way out of allegations that he kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructed efforts to retrieve them.

The accusations must’ve left a bitter taste in the hosts’ mouths, as they argued that those on the left were doing exactly what they’d done for weeks: attacking a sitting judge.

“This is a credible person with a great life story that is doing her job,” said McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary. “And yet she’s called ‘partisan petty primadonna,’ ‘whacko,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘right-wing,’ ‘outlandish,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘nutty,’ ‘loony.’”

“No, she’s a credible woman and she deserves to be respected—and I thought we didn’t attack judges? Bring in Judge Merchan, oh wait, but we do if it’s going against us,” McEnany added.

From the time jury selection began on April 15 to the court’s adjournment on May 21, Fox News made more than 220 claims about Judge Juan Merchan’s so-called anti-Trump bias, according to Media Matters. When Merchan placed a gag order on Trump to prevent him from making rampant, baseless accusations against the judge, courtroom staff, and family members, Fox took up Trump’s crusade against those holding him to account, constantly pushing the story that Merchan was biased when the former president couldn’t. Now they’re accusing the other guys of doing exactly the same thing.

“It’s really disheartening to watch, and also, again underscores the hypocrisy of the left,” Compagno said, underscoring her own disheartening hypocrisy. She herself was a sharp critic of Merchan, who she argued sided too readily with prosecutors.

“Because apparently, if you’re Judge Alito you can be attacked, if you’re Judge Clarence Thomas you can be attacked, if you’re Judge Cannon—but somehow they’re missing the whole substance, which I guess they don’t like her ruling on both sides, they’re not seeing the facts here,” Compagno continued, completely unaware that criticizing judges for their political bias is normal—if there’s actual evidence that they’re biased and if the criticisms don’t involve presidential candidates directing their mobs against the judge’s family members.

Importantly, Cannon has not ruled “on both sides.” Cannon processed pretrial motions at a glacial pace, threw out portions of the case, showed an unfaltering compliance to all of Trump’s time-wasting requests, and even indefinitely postponed the actual trial. Last week, it was reported that Cannon refused calls from senior federal judges to hand off the classified documents case, signaling her insistence on keeping the high-profile case on her desk. This week, she has brought the trial to a complete standstill so Trump’s lawyers can play out a hearing over the validity of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment.

Faulkner also weighed in on criticism of Cannon. “Well, they don’t want a judge who’s actually going to look at this from a fresh perspective, and follow the justice and the legal system’s rules on this,” she said, arguing that attacks on the Trump-appointed judge went “all the way to the White House and the president’s campaign team.”

“From a group of people, liberal media, who said, you know, you can’t pick on women, they fall to the woman card, the race card, yet they pick on who they need to pick on,” she said. When Cannon had announced the hearing into Smith’s appointment, “the left lost its mind, and this is proof of that. I wish they were classier at it, but they’re not.”

Faulkner too readily forgets that she herself was part of Fox’s smear campaign against a judge and his family: She once said that Merchan’s decision to preside over the case was a form of “legal terrorism.” If hypocrisy is tasteless, Faulkner’s not so classy now.