The Florida judge overseeing Donald Trump’s confidential documents trial dismissed the case against the former president on Monday, saying the appointment and funding of special counsel Jack Smith was illegal.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, said in her 93-page ruling that Smith’s nomination was “illegal” and unconditional. “The clerk has been instructed to dismiss this case,” the judge wrote.
O decision occurred on the first day of the Republican National Convention and following an assassination attempt on the former president over the weekend.
Trump praised the decision in a statement that referenced Saturday’s shooting and said other criminal cases against him should also be dismissed. A source who spoke directly to the former president said he was “surprised” but “very happy” with Cannon’s decision.
A White House spokesman referred investigations into Trump’s classified documents case dismissal to the Justice Department. The Justice Department and the special counsel’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Christopher Kise, Trump’s lawyer, praised Cannon’s decision.
“Judge Cannon today restored the rule of law and made the right call for America,” Kise said in a statement. “From the beginning, the Attorney General and Special Counsel ignored critical constitutional restrictions on the exercise of the prosecutorial power of the United States.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special counsel in November 2022, tasking him with overseeing federal investigations into Trump’s handling and retention of classified documents after he left office, as well as his efforts to overturn the results of 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s lawyers argued in court documents filed in February that the Constitution’s Appointments Clause “does not permit the Attorney General to nominate, without Senate confirmation, a like-minded private citizen and political ally to exercise the power to prosecute U.S. As such, Jack Smith does not have the authority to prosecute this action.”
The special counsel’s team argued that the attorney general has statutory authority to appoint “inferior officers” and that previous court rulings have affirmed the attorney general’s authority to appoint special counsel.
Cannon found the appointment to be improper.
“Since November 2022, Special Counsel Smith has exercised ‘power that [he] did not legally possess.’ All of the actions that have flowed from her faulty appointment – including her pursuit of the Superseding Indictment on which this case currently depends – have been unlawful exercises of executive power,” she wrote.
Arguments by Trump’s legal team have been unsuccessfully raised against previous special counsels, including Robert Mueller, who oversaw an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and David Weiss, the special counsel who oversaw the prosecution of Hunter Biden.
It’s unclear whether Cannon’s decision could impact the cases against the president’s son. In his ruling, Cannon specifically compares Smith’s appointment to Weiss’s because Weiss was already a U.S. attorney and Smith was a private citizen when he was appointed.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
From here, Smith will be able to appeal this rejection to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court will certainly hear the case and will likely hold oral arguments. However, even if it were to be heard expeditiously, and even if the appeals court overturned Cannon’s ruling, Monday’s ruling all but guarantees that the confidential documents case could not go to trial before the election.
This decision does not have any immediate impact in the case of interference in federal elections. The only courts that can instruct the judge in this case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, to rule in a specific way are the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.
Trump was first charged in the case in June last year. The indictment accused him of lying and conspiring to mislead federal investigators in order to withhold classified materials that he knew were still classified after he left the White House.
The indictment alleged that the documents he took with him “included information about the defense and weapons capabilities of the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attacks; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
In August 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s estate in Florida and found more than 100 confidential documents there, despite being assured by Trump’s lawyers that all of these documents had been returned.
He later received additional charges for allegedly attempting to obstruct the investigation. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Cannon’s involvement in the case preceded Trump’s indictment. In 2022, she temporarily suspended the FBI’s review of documents that had been recovered at Mar-a-Lago, while also granting Trump’s request for a special master to review the evidence.
That decision was overturned by a panel of appeals court judges who suggested that Cannon had attempted to “create an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents.”
The criminal case was randomly assigned to Cannon after Trump was indicted, and she has been repeatedly criticized by legal experts for her circuitous approach to the case. At one point, the trial was scheduled for early this year, but Cannon postponed the trial date indefinitely, citing “a myriad” of pending motions in the case.
Cannon’s ruling comes two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling largely in Trump’s favor in the federal election interference case. The high court ruling found that he had immunity for some of his conduct as president and that Chutkan would have to decide which of his actions were official presidential acts before pursuing the case.
The D.C. case, which at one point was scheduled to go to trial in March, has been put on hold while the high court wrestles with the immunity issue, and Chutkan will need to rule on the “official acts” issues before the case goes to trial. . , making it impossible to start before the elections. Trump’s lawyers did not challenge Smith’s nomination in that case, but they are likely to do so now given Cannon’s ruling.
The immunity ruling will also likely have some impact on Trump’s state election interference case in Georgia, but that case has been put on hold until at least October while an appeals court hears arguments over whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from the case.
Trump was convicted in March of 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York, and was originally scheduled to be sentenced last week. The judge in that case delayed sentencing until at least September, after Trump’s lawyers filed documents arguing that the conviction should be overturned due to the immunity ruling. They noted that some of the evidence at trial involved Trump’s official acts in the White House. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is arguing against reversal or a new trial.
In an opinion concurring with the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that Smith’s appointment as special counsel raised a potential violation of the Constitution’s provisions on the power of appointment.
“If there is no law that establishes the position that the Special Prosecutor holds, he will not be able to continue with this process. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, much less a former president,” Thomas wrote in his opinion, which Cannon cited three times in his ruling.
Trump’s lawyers flagged Thomas’s opinion to Cannon last week, saying it “adds strength to motions relating to the appointments and appropriations clauses.”
On a response Friday, Smith’s office countered the single judge’s “concurrence…does not bind this Court nor provide a sound basis for departing from the uniform conclusion of all courts to have considered the question that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Council. ”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
