Other legal experts have asked if Judge Cannon has the judicial chops to handle a case of this type and magnitude. She has, after all, been a federal judge for only some two and a half years and has never tried a case involving the theft of classified documents.

For example, Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor, said that “she is a very inexperienced judge, so even if she weren’t favorable to Trump, she might hear a lot of stuff and think she is hearing stuff that is unusual even though it’s made all the time.”

While concerns about her judgment and ability to manage the case are understandable, Judge Cannon is not known to have said or written anything that suggests such a bias toward Republicans or blindness toward justice that would wholly disqualify her from a case involving Mr. Trump. The health and independence of our judiciary depends, in part, on judges learning from episodes like this and, in her case, showing that she will not stray from properly applying the law to Mr. Trump as she would to any other criminal defendant.

History shows that Trump-appointed judges have not given him any special treatment when he has defied the rule of law. Nearly every Trump-appointed judge (including his Supreme Court appointees) denied Mr. Trump’s litigation efforts to further his falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. This same concern — that Republican-appointed judges would rule in favor of a member of their own party — was raised during Watergate. The prosecutors investigating the burglary and cover-up, including me, were keenly aware of the concerns that the Supreme Court, on which sat four justices appointed by President Richard Nixon, would decline to order him to produce his Oval Office tapes to the special prosecutor. The court, however, unanimously (with one judge recusing himself) ordered Nixon to do so.

Judge Cannon’s inexperience puts even more pressure on the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team: They will have to work harder to provide the judge more legal context through motion papers and legal memorandums than would normally be done with a more seasoned jurist. Mr. Smith and his team are certainly up to that task.

Judge Cannon also may not be the only judicial officer making decisions on the case. Under federal rules, Judge Cannon can delegate a decision or decisions on some or all of the pretrial motions to the magistrate judge. Judge Cannon has final say on the magistrate judge’s decisions, but typically they are rarely overturned by the district court judge.

The magistrate judge assigned to this case, Bruce E. Reinhart, is an experienced lawyer and jurist. He has been in his position for about five years, was an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida for 12 years, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for eight years, and was in private practice for 10 years, according to his federal court biography. (On Tuesday, Jonathan Goodman was the magistrate judge for Mr. Trump’s appearance, but he is not expected to remain involved in the case.)