Judge Cannon Dismisses Trump Documents Case: Read It For Yourself
Citing the “Unlawful Appointment and Funding of Special Counsel Jack Smith” Judge Cannon has dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump
Read It For Yourself here:
judge-dismisses-trump-documents-case
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.
Hours later, special counsel Jack Smith’s office said it would appeal the order, which could result in it eventually being overturned by a higher court. But for now at least, the dismissal by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon brings a stunning and abrupt halt to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.
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.
It’s the latest stroke of good fortune in the four criminal cases Trump has faced. He was convicted in May in his New York hush money trial, but the sentencing has been postponed after a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. That opinion will cause major delays in a separate case charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Another election subversion case filed in Atlanta has been delayed by revelations of a romantic relationship between the district attorney and a special prosecutor she hired for the case.
In a statement on his social media platform, Trump said the dismissal “should be just the first step” and the three other cases, which he called “Witch Hunts,” should also be thrown out.
The classified documents case had been seen as the most legally clear-cut of the four given the breadth of evidence that prosecutors say they had accumulated, including the testimony of close aides and former lawyers, and because the conduct at issue occurred after Trump left the White House in 2021 and lost the powers of the presidency.
This feels like a total gibberish outcome even if true.
Trump was indicted by a grand jury, not Jack Smith.
This indictment happened in a United State District Court, not ‘Special court that exists due to Jack Smith’.
The case is the United State of America v. Donald Trump, not ‘Jack Smith v. Donald Trump’.
Pretending that Jack Smith has somehow been appointed ‘unconstitutionally’ doesn’t change any of that. You don’t magically have cases dismissed because the prosecutor’s office wasn’t following the law in _hiring practices_, in what universe could that be how it possibly worked?
Jack Smith wasn’t making policy decisions that might be in question, he was heading a office that built a legal case, and that legal case doesn’t cease to exist. He presented that legal case, again, to a grand judge that indicted Trump.
Even if this ‘his appointment is unconstitional’ theory is true (It is not), it should do nothing at all to the case, and the proper thing for the judge to do is to direct some other, presumable lawfully-appointed, prosecutor in the Justice Department to take it over.
(Although, in actuality, as this _shouldn’t_ do anything to the case, Trump’s counsel really shouldn’t be able to raise it as an issue. They have no standing.)Report
And yet here we are.Report
As I said in the other post, her legal reasoning was “the bullet missed? He’s gonna win. Time to show I’m On The Team.”Report
That Canon would end up here was an openly known possibility for weeks before this – what with her holding hearings and allowing amicus briefs on all of this. That Jack smith has yet to drop his appeal and force the 11th circuit to rule (preferably en banc) is not good.Report