" />

The Moderate Voice

An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right


You are here: Home / Breaking News / TRUMP-APPOINTED JUDGE CANNON DISMISSES TRUMP CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE (UPDATED)

TRUMP-APPOINTED JUDGE CANNON DISMISSES TRUMP CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE (UPDATED)

by Leave a Comment

In a bombshell ruling, Trump-appointed District Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump. Many legal experts expect Special Counsel Jack Smith will appeal the ruling and even seek to remove her from the case.

This is the latest major victory for Trump.

CNN:

A federal judge on Monday dismissed the classified documents case against Donald Trump, a shock ruling that clears away one of the major legal challenges facing the former president.

In a 93-page ruling, District Judge Aileen Cannon said the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution. She did not rule on whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper or not.

“In the end, it seems the Executive’s growing comfort in appointing ‘regulatory’ special counsels in the more recent era has followed an ad hoc pattern with little judicial scrutiny,” Cannon wrote.

The ruling by Cannon, a judge Trump appointed in 2020, comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Even though a trial before the presidential election was considered highly unlikely, many legal experts had viewed the classified documents case as the strongest one of the four cases that were pending against the former president.

The White House referred requests for comment to the Justice Department. Smith’s office has not responded to a call for comment.

Smith had charged Trump last year with taking classified documents from the White House and resisting the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials. He pleaded not guilty.

In a separate criminal case brought by Smith against Trump in Washington, DC, the special counsel was pursuing federal charges stemming from Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump also faces a state-level election subversion case in Georgia and he was convicted of state crimes in New York earlier this year for his role in a hush money payment scheme before the 2016 election.

Trump’s efforts to dismiss the case under the appointments clause was seen as a long shot, as several special counsels – even during his own presidential administration – were run the same way.

But the fringe argument gained steam when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas threw his support behind the theory, writing in a footnote in the high court’s presidential immunity decision that there are “serious questions whether the Attorney General has violated that structure by creating an office of the Special Counsel that has not been established by law. Those questions must be answered before this prosecution can proceed.”

Still, Cannon held a hearing on the issue several weeks ago, pushing attorneys to explain exactly how Smith’s investigation into Trump was being funded. The judge’s questions were so pointed that special counsel attorney James Pearce argued that, even if Cannon were to throw out the case due to an appointments clause issue, the Justice Department was “prepared” to fund Smith’s cases through trial if necessary.

Cannon said in her order that the special counsel’s position “effectively usurps” Congress’ “important legislative authority” by giving it to the head of a department – DOJ, in this case – to appoint such an official.

“If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so,” she wrote.

The Washington Post:

The federal judge overseeing the classified documents charges against former president Donald Trump has dismissed the indictment on the grounds that special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed, according to a court filing Monday.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling is a remarkable win for Trump, whose lawyers have attempted long-shot argument after long-shot argument to dismiss the case. Other courts have rejected arguments similar to the one that he made in Florida about the legality of Smith’s appointment.

The Justice Department is highly likely to appeal the decision, a legal fight that could end up at the Supreme Court. By dismissing the entire indictment, Cannon’s decision also means the charges are dropped for Trump’s two co-defendants, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.

Even if Cannon’s ruling is eventually overruled, the decision to dismiss Trump’s indictment adds to a string of legal victories for him in recent weeks, including a sweeping Supreme Court ruling July 1 that gives former presidents broad immunity for their official acts while in office.

On social media, Trump said Monday’s dismissal “should be just the first step” and that the rest of the criminal and civil cases against him also should be tossed out of court. He accused Democrats of conspiring against him to bring those cases, a claim that has been repeatedly denied by federal, state, and local officials.

“Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System,” he wrote.

Trump’s legal team has long considered the classified documents case to be the strongest of the four criminal cases against him — in part because the acts in question mostly occurred after he left the White House — and was the one they were most worried about.

The former president was charged with 40 counts of illegally retaining classified defense information and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the material. Some of the documents found in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, contained information about top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them, The Washington Post reported last year.

Cannon’s decision comes as Trump is preparing to be formally nominated as the Republican presidential nominee in this year’s election, with the Republican National Convention beginning in Milwaukee on Monday.

UPDATE:

The Daily Beast:

Cannon based her decision largely around Justice Clarence Thomas’ recent concurrence that cast doubt on the legality of special counsel appointments. In his presidential immunity opinion, Thomas questioned whether the Attorney General Merrick Garland violated the U.S. Constitution’s Appointments Clause by appointing a special counsel to an office not created by law, writing that the Executive Branch “cannot create offices at his pleasure.”

Smith urged Cannon last week to not bind herself to the concurrence, which did not represent the unanimous opinion of the court. Cannon rejected that plea on Monday, writing that her decision was based “on the available Supreme Court guidance.”

She also referenced Thomas’ concurrence repeatedly throughout the 93-page decision, in one instance by citing various elements of case law to bolster her decision—including Thomas’ opinion.

Cannon’s order puts the case on ice indefinitely, which is exactly what Trump and his defense team have been pushing for since he was indicted last year on allegations he swiped classified documents from the White House and kept them stored all around Mar-a-Lago, his South Florida estate. He also faced charges for allegedly obstructing the feds’ attempts to retrieve the documents during an FBI raid.

The former president has enjoyed a string of legal victories in recent weeks, including a sweeping Supreme Court ruling that’s given former presidents broad immunity for their official acts while in office and had his sentencing pushed back for his hush-money conviction in New York City.

Talking Points Memo:

The immediate effect of the dismissal will be to end what was seen as the simplest and most threatening of the criminal cases against Trump. Trump’s decision to retain classified records after the government repeatedly asked for them to be returned took place nearly entirely after he left office, and purportedly imperiled some of the most sensitive national security information the government possesses.

The outright dismissal will allow Smith to appeal Cannon’s ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Until Monday, Cannon had mostly ruled in ways that deprived the parties of the ability to appeal, effectively delaying any potential trial until after the November election.

The ruling caps more than a year of stunning decisions from Cannon, beginning in the investigation’s pre-indictment phase. Then, Cannon broke with fundamental principles of criminal law to order a halt to the investigation after Trump filed a civil suit seeking the same.

The 11th Circuit reversed Cannon’s decision, ending that case. But after Trump was indicted in the Southern District of Florida, the case was assigned once again to Judge Cannon.

Cannon’s subsequent behavior sparked heated public speculation over whether she was acting out of ineptitude or malice. But the result has been clear: She took a case over the illegal retention of national security secrets and transformed it into months of interminable delay, avoiding making key rulings and entertaining even Trump’s most tenuous and far-fetched arguments, often by holding full hearings to examine them in great detail.

In this case, Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case by finding that Smith was unlawfully appointed reads more like an appellate – or Supreme Court – ruling than that of a district court judge, typically charged with applying existing precedent.

Cannon’s ruling both nakedly benefits Trump and contravenes rulings issued by other conservative judges. Hunter Biden, for example, moved to dismiss the gun charges against him by arguing that Special Counsel David Weiss was improperly appointed. The judge in that case, a Trump appointee, rejected the motion.

It’s one of many examples in which other judges – even of the same ideological stripe – rejected the legal theory that Cannon endorsed on Monday.

Rolling Stone:

With this ruling, Cannon has effectively usurped the long-standing structure surrounding the appointment of special counsels by the Justice Department.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents are entitled to immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office. The case that came before the court stemmed from a challenge to a separate indictment brought by Smith against Trump over his efforts to interfere with the results of the 2020 election. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went further than the court’s 6-3 decision, writing that “in this case, the Attorney General purported to appoint a private citizen as Special Counsel to prosecute a former President on behalf of the United States. But, I am not sure that any office for the Special Counsel has been ‘established by Law,’ as the Constitution requires.”

“If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding,” he added.

The classified documents case was one of four major criminal cases brought against Trump since last spring. He was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York this May, but sentencing was delayed following the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. The ruling has also thrown the status of the Justice Department’s case against Trump for his role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election into flux, as Trump was still in office as that effort was taking place. Trump was also charged in Georgia for his efforts to undermine the state’s election results, but that case also figures to be significantly delayed by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Photo 36555505 | Dismissed © Juan Moyano | Dreamstime.com