No, photo does not show Judge Aileen Cannon | Fact check

Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: Photo shows US District Judge Aileen Cannon in a 'Team Trump' hat

A June 9 Instagram video (direct link, archive link) shows a man discussing an image of two women with red, blue and white lines painted on their faces wearing "Team Trump" hats.

"Okay folks so you see this picture?" the man says. "On the left there that's Judge Aileen Cannon and she's been initially assigned to the new Trump case in Florida so as you can imagine there are some problems here."

The post generated over 3,000 likes in less than a week. A June 9 tweet with the same claim was also retweeted more than 4,000 times and shared over 60 times on Facebook, according to social media insights tool CrowdTangle.

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Our rating: False

The photo does not show Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been assigned to oversee the federal case related to former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. It shows two Trump supporters at one of his campaign rallies in September 2022.

Viral photo shows two Trump supporters at a campaign rally

On June 8, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 counts related to the hundreds of classified documents the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, as USA TODAY previously reported. Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge for the U.S District Court of Southern Florida, is set to initially oversee the federal case.

However, neither of the women in the photo shown on the Instagram video is Cannon.

Rather, the photo shows two unidentified women at a Sept. 3, 2022, Trump campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where the former president gave a speech endorsing local candidates ahead of the November 2022 midterm elections. Getty photographer Spencer Platt captured the image.

The facial features and hair color of the women don’t match Cannon.

Fact check: Trump can run in 2024 even if charged in classified documents case

The Twitter user who originally shared the claim told the Associated Press they found the image after searching on Google Images for a photo of Cannon.

Those search results bring up a Slate article that used the photo three days after the rally in Wilkes-Barre. The article criticizes Cannon’s 2022 order for Trump to have a special master review the classified documents taken during the FBI’s search, a move that temporarily halted the prosecution's investigation into the documents. An appeals court dismissed the order in December 2022.

The photo's caption in the Slate article originally read, “Trump rallygoers, or members of the judiciary? It’s hard to say,” according to an archive. It was later changed to read only “Trump rallygoers.” It never mentioned Cannon.

USA TODAY previously debunked a claim that Cannon was fired from her position.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

PolitiFact and the Associated Press also debunked the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Photo shows Trump rally-goers, not Judge Aileen Cannon | Fact check