The federal judge who oversees donald trumpFlorida Confidential Documents Trial Rejected the case against the former president Monday, claiming that the appointment and funding for special advisor Jack Smith were 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 close this case,” she wrote.
She problemIt isthat ofdecision on the first day of the Republican National Convention, two days after an assassination attempt on Trump.
Trump praised the decision in a statement that referred to Saturday’s shooting and said other criminal cases against him should also be dropped. A source who spoke directly to Trump said he was “surprised” but “very happy” with Cannon’s decision.
Smith’s team indicated it would appeal Cannon’s decision.
“The dismissal of the case diverges from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts that have considered the issue that the Attorney General is legally authorized to appoint a Special Counsel,” spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement. Lawyer to appeal court order.”
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.
Trump’s legal team’s arguments were unsuccessfully raised against previous special advisorsincluding 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 affect the cases against Biden, the president’s son. In his ruling, Cannon specifically contrasts Smith’s appointment with Weiss’s because Weiss was already a United States Attorney and Smith was a private citizen at the time he was appointed.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smith will be able to appeal the 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 the appeal were heard expeditiously, and even if the appeals court overturned Cannon’s decision, the decision virtually guarantees that the confidential documents case could not go to trial before the election.
The 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 loaded for the first time in the case in June 2023. The prosecution accused him of lying and planning deceive federal investigators 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 F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Trump’s Florida estate and found more than 100 confidential documents there, despite being assured by Trump’s lawyers that all of these documents had been returned.
He was later accused of attempting to obstruct the investigation. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Cannon’s involvement preceded Trump’s indictment. In 2022, she temporarily interrupted the FBI’s review of documents that were recovered at Mar-a-Lago and fulfilled Trump’s request for a special master to review the evidence.
A panel of appeals court judges annulled this decisionsuggesting that Cannon 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 Supreme Court issued a ruling largely in Trump’s favor in the federal election interference case. O decision considered that he had immunity for part of his conduct as president and that Chutkan would have to decide which of his actions were official presidential acts before the case could proceed.
The Washington 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 will probably do it now given Cannon’s decision.
The immunity decision is also expected to have some impact on Trump’s life. case of interference in state elections in Georgia, which has been suspended until at least October while an appeals court hears arguments about 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 this case postponed the sentence until at least September, after Trump’s lawyers filed papers arguing that the conviction should be thrown out because of the immunity ruling. They said 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, Judge 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.”
In airresponse Friday, Smith’s office countered that the single judge’s “concurrence…does not bind this Court nor provide a solid 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 Prosecutor.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
