September 7, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
Special counsel Jack Smith's planned appeal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's order is expected to tee up a court fight that might reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Though the case had long been stalled, and the prospect of a trial before the November election already nonexistent, the judge’s order is a significant legal and political victory for Trump as he recovers from a weekend assassination attempt and prepares to accept the Republican nomination in Milwaukee this week.
There’s no scenario in which a revived prosecution could reach trial before the November election — and it presumably won’t take place at all in the event Trump is elected president and orders his Justice Department to dismiss it. Still, Cannon’s order ensures many more months of legal wrangling in a criminal case that became snarled over the last year by interminable delays.
The judge's 93-page order held that Smith's selection as special counsel violated the Constitution because he was named to the position directly by Attorney General Merrick Garland instead of being appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
It's impossible to say whether the opinion will stand or be reversed on appeal, though other judges in other districts in recent years have reached opposite conclusions of Cannon, upholding the constitutionality of special counsels who were appointed by Justice Department leadership and funded by a permanent indefinite appropriation.
The Supreme Court, in a 50-year-old opinion involving President Richard Nixon, held that the Justice Department had the statutory authority to appoint a special prosecutor.
And even though Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas raised questions this month about the legality of Smith's appointment, no other justice signed onto his concurring opinion in a case that conferred broad immunity on former presidents.
The Smith team is likely to point to all of those court holdings in casting Cannon to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as an outlier who made not just a bad decision but “an irreversibly bad decision," said Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law school professor.
A spokesman for Smith's office, in announcing Monday that the Justice Department had authorized an appeal, said the opinion “deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel.”
But Jesse Panuccio, a former associate attorney general in the Trump administration Justice Department, said anger over Cannon's opinion — which he called a "careful and scholarly" analysis — was misplaced.
“If you took out of the equation the derangement that comes from anyone analyzing anything that has to do with Trump and you just asked legal scholars 10 years ago, ‘Hey, are there any issues involving independent counsels, special counsels?’" he said, the answer would be yes.
Panuccio added: “I think this is a very serious issue, and it’s an issue frankly that when I was at the Justice Department, I had reservations about."
Trump on Monday said the dismissal “should be just the first step” and the three other cases against him, which he called “Witch Hunts,” should also be thrown out.
It is unclear if Smith's team will seek to have Cannon reassigned in the event that the appeals court reinstates the case. A Smith spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday on that possibility. It's an unusual request and one prosecutors in this case had avoided making.
Gerhardt, the North Carolina professor, said he did not see a downside to Smith's team making such a request.
But Panuccio said he didn't think Cannon's order gave Smith's team a sufficient basis to complain, especially given that Cannon's position was backed by a member of the Supreme Court opinion.
“I think Jack Smith would be flirting with fire if he were to make that request based on this opinion simply because he lost an issue,” he said.
