Left: President Donald Trump speaks with reporters while flying aboard Air Force One en route from Calgary, Canada to Joint Base Andrews, Md., late Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) Center: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida) Right: Ryan Routh, the man suspected in the apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (Martin County Sheriff’s Office via AP)
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has rejected a request from the man accused of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump to have the jury questionnaire in his upcoming criminal trial unsealed.
The denial marks the latest legal rebuff for Ryan Routh, a 59-year-old man accused of hiding out with a rifle at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sept. 15, 2024, in hopes of shooting the then-Republican nominee for president. While discussing pre-jury selection procedures, Routh’s lawyers objected to a proposed plan to keep the jury questionnaire sealed before the trial.
Cannon outlined the two parts that would take place in a status conference regarding jury selection procedures. Part one, she said, would be public and “unrestricted” regarding the general logistics of jury selection, while part two would “proceed in sealed session and focus on a substantive discussion of the proposed juror questionnaire itself.”
It is this juror questionnaire that Routh’s legal team wanted unsealed, but Cannon, a Trump appointee who also presided over and later dismissed his Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, denied this request and additionally found that making part two of the conference publicly available would carry “significant risk.”
“The Court finds, at this juncture, that sealing Part II of the status conference is a necessary and sufficiently tailored means of avoiding the significant risk of tainting the jury pool from pre-trial dissemination of substantive questions proposed for inclusion in a jury questionnaire,” Cannon wrote in her Tuesday order.
“In reaching this determination, the Court has balanced Defendant’s and the public’s strong interest in openness of judicial proceedings against the critical need to ensure a fair, uncontaminated, and impartial jury pool in this case of high public interest,” the Southern District of Florida judge added.
The status conference is taking place on Wednesday in Fort Pierce, Florida. In a separate order, as Cannon noted, Routh’s request to attend virtually was denied. His trial on five charges, including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, and assault of a federal officer, is set to begin on Sept. 8.
This is not the first loss Cannon has handed Routh in the lead-up to the much-anticipated trial. In May, she rejected his bid to dismiss the two final counts in his indictment: possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number and illegally owning a firearm as a convicted felon. Days later, she denied his motion to suppress a witness identification made shortly after the alleged assassination attempt.
The purported attempt to kill the then-former president occurred less than two months before the general election, which Trump won. It was the second alleged attempt against his life on the campaign trail, with the first taking place during a Butler County, Pennsylvania, rally in July, where the gunman was killed.
