Judge dismisses Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified docs criminal case

Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the federal criminal case against Donald Trump charging him with amassing highly sensitive national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate and then obstructing government efforts to reclaim them.

Cannon, in a 93-page ruling, concluded that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.

“The Court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme — the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law,” Cannon wrote.

Cannon, nominated by Trump and confirmed to the bench following the 2020 election, disparaged as “highly-strained” Smith’s interpretation of a legal provision that he and the Justice Department have argued authorized his appointment.

Smith’s office announced Monday afternoon that it will appeal the decision.

“The dismissal of the case 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,” Smith spokesperson Peter Carr said in a statement. “The Justice Department has authorized the Special Counsel to appeal the court’s order.”

A spokesperson for the former president did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision. However, Trump used the ruling to call for the dismissal of all the pending criminal and civil cases against him, including a lawsuit from the New York attorney general and two civil suits from writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump lost all at trial and has appealed.

“The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME,” Trump wrote in a social media postshortly after the judge’s decision was released Monday. The post has since been deleted.

Cannon’s ruling came just days after a man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, which prompted a rush of calls from his allies to demand that the four ongoing criminal prosecutions of the former president be dropped. Of all the judges handling the Trump cases, Cannon has drawn particular scrutiny for taking unorthodox legal positions that have tended to benefit the former president.

The ruling provoked sharp rejections from some corners of the legal community and from Trump’s detractors in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer quickly slammed the ruling, urging Smith to appeal it and demanded that the case be assigned to a different judge.

“This is further evidence that Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned,” Schumer said.

Though the trial had already seemed highly unlikely to proceed before the end of the year, her ruling virtually ensures it. And if Trump wins the 2024 election, he’s expected to unravel the case altogether.

Smith’s team had asked Cannon for an opportunity to brief her — should she seriously consider invalidating his appointment — on remedies that fall short of dismissing the indictment.

That might have included simply reassigning the case to other federal prosecutors or putting the bulk of the existing prosecution team under the supervision of a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney.

But Cannon said Smith had many opportunities to present alternative remedies, so she didn’t need to consider them.

The logic of Cannon’s latest ruling would have invalidated some but not all of the special prosecutors the Justice Department has named since a federal law authorizing the appointment of independent counsels expired in 1999.

Since that time, special counsel appointments have been made under regulations that give such prosecutors broad independence of operation from other Justice Department components, but subject their major decisions to potential veto by the attorney general.

Under Cannon’s view, the Justice Department lacks a legal basis to bring private lawyers into the department to head up special counsel investigations. Her conclusion would have nixed the appointment of Robert Mueller, named in 2017 to examine allegations of ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, as well as that of Robert Hur, selected last year to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified records. Some other special counsels named from the department’s existing ranks of prosecutors, though, would not have been impacted.

Smith’s team argued that the history of such appointments over the past quarter century meant Congress had blessed such arrangements, but Cannon disagreed.

“At most, the history reflects an ad hoc, inconsistent practice of naming prosecutors from both inside and outside of government (typically in response to national scandal) who possessed wildly variant degrees of power and autonomy. The lack of consistency makes it near impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions about Congress’s approval of modern special counsels like Special Counsel Smith,” she wrote.

Cannon’s lengthy ruling cites, on three separate occasions, a solo concurring opinion Justice Clarence Thomas issued earlier this month when the Supreme Court ruled on Trump’s presidential immunity claims in connection with another prosecution Smith brought against Trump: the case charging him with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s lawyers never raised the constitutional arguments against Smith in that case, but some outsiders did in friend-of-the-court briefs and Thomas chose to opine on them when the high court released its opinion concluding that Trump and all current and former presidents are entitled to some immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.

Smith’s appeal of Cannon’s ruling will go to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and then, potentially, to the Supreme Court. Some critics of Cannon’s handling of the Trump case have been eager to see such an appeal, hoping that it might lead to her removal from the case.

“The dismissal of the docs case is so bereft of legal reasoning as to be utterly absurd,” former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote on X just after the decision emerged. “Has to be appealed and this incompetent judge removed.”

But, thus far, Smith has given no sign he intends to seek her removal. In any event, Cannon’s decision dismissing the case outright halts all proceedings in the matter before her.

No trial date was on the calendar at the time of the dismissal and, given other pending decisions and issues, it seemed impossible the classified documents case would reach trial before the November election. If Trump wins, any attorney general he selected would likely fire Smith and end both the criminal prosecutions he brought against the former president.

Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer who previously defended Trump in the classified documents case, said such a move would be all-but-certain.

“Does he even need to direct DOJ to drop it, or will a new attorney general say, ‘Hey look, we’re not going to keep doing this, we don’t like this,’” Parlatore said. “He doesn’t need to tell his DOJ to dismiss this case. They will do it.”

Scott Brady, a U.S. Attorney during the Trump administration, defended Cannon’s ruling. “This case demonstrates exactly why our federal judges have lifetime appointments: to do the right thing even when it is politically unpopular,” he said.