Shortly after Judge Aileen Cannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case, two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to hand it off to another jurist, according to two people briefed on the conversations.

The judges who approached Cannon — including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia Altonaga — each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge, the two people said.

But Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, wanted to keep the case and refused the judges’ entreaties. Her assignment raised eyebrows because she has scant trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Trump by intervening in a way that helped him in the criminal investigation that led to his indictment, only to be reversed in a critical rebuke by a conservative appeals court panel.

The extraordinary and previously undisclosed effort by Cannon’s colleagues to persuade her to step aside adds another dimension to the increasing criticism of how she has gone on to handle the case.

She has broken, according to lawyers who operate there, with a general practice of federal judges in the Southern District of Florida of delegating some pretrial motions to a magistrate — in this instance, Judge Bruce Reinhart. While he is subordinate to her, Reinhart is an older and much more experienced jurist. In 2022, he was the one who signed off on an FBI warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club and residence in Florida, for highly sensitive government files that Trump kept after leaving office.

Since then, Cannon has exhibited hostility to prosecutors, handled pretrial motions slowly and indefinitely postponed the trial, declining to set a start date even though both the prosecution and the defense had told her they could be ready to start this summer.

But Trump’s lawyers have also urged her to delay any trial until after the election, and her handling of the case has virtually ensured they will succeed in that strategy. Should Trump retake the White House, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case.

As Cannon’s handling of the case has come under intensifying scrutiny, her critics have suggested that she could be in over her head, in the tank for Trump — or both.

Against that backdrop, word of the early efforts by her colleagues on the bench to persuade her to step aside — and the significance of her decision not to do so — has spread among other federal judges and the people who know them.

Neither Cannon nor Altonaga directly responded to requests for comment, including by emails sent via the clerk of the district court, Angela Noble. Noble later wrote in an email, “Our judges do not comment on pending cases.”

The two people who discussed the efforts to persuade her to hand off the case spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Each had been told about it by different federal judges in the Southern District of Florida, including Altonaga.

Neither of the people identified the second federal judge in Florida who had reached out to Cannon.

One of the people said each outreach took place by telephone. The first judge to call Cannon, this person said, suggested to her that it would be better for the case to be handled by a jurist based closer to the district’s busiest courthouse in Miami, where the grand jury that indicted Trump had sat.

The Miami courthouse also had a secure facility approved to hold the sort of highly classified information that would be discussed in pretrial motions and used as evidence in the case. Cannon is the sole judge in the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive north of Miami. When she was assigned to the case, the courthouse in Fort Pierce did not have a secure facility.

Because Cannon kept the case, taxpayers have since had to pay to build a secure room — known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — there.

After that initial argument failed to sway Cannon to step aside, the person said, Altonaga placed a call.

The chief judge — an appointee of President George W. Bush — is said to have made a more pointed argument: It would be bad optics for Cannon to oversee the trial because of what had happened during the criminal investigation that led to Trump’s indictment on charges of illegally retaining national security documents after leaving office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.

Soon after the search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Trump filed a lawsuit against the government protesting the seizure of the materials, which he claimed were his personal property, and asking for a special master to be appointed to sift through them. Rather than letting Reinhart handle that lawsuit, as would be the normal procedure, Cannon chose to decide the matter.

Shocking legal experts across ideological lines, she banned investigators from gaining access to the evidence and appointed a special master, although she said that person would only make recommendations to her and she would make the final decisions.

Cannon’s decision was unusual in part because she intervened before there were any charges — treating Trump differently from typical targets of search warrants based on his supposed special status as a former president.