BREAKING: Judge DISMISSES Trump’s Documents Case, Cites Jack Smith’s Unconstitutional Appointment

A federal judge has dismissed the Justice Department’s classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, agreeing with defense attorneys that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was “unlawful” and violated the former president’s due process.

Politico senior reporter Kyle Cheney spotted the latest document out of Florida U.S. District Court where Judge Aileen Cannon wrote that “Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.” She added that Smith’s use of a “permanent indefinite appropriate also violates the Appropriations Clause” but that “the Court need not address the proper remedy for the funding violation given the dismissal on Appointments Clause grounds.”

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BREAKING: Judge Cannon has dismissed the Trump documents case, citing violation of appointments clause: pic.twitter.com/GPV9jXYAfZ

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 15, 2024

Further on in her 93-page decision, the Trump-appointed judge writes at length about the power of Congress to appoint special agents of the DOJ, a power that she said was not conferred to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. “The relevant history, according to Special Counsel Smith, shows that Congress tacitly authorized—or silently acquiesced to—the use of Section 515 (or its predecessor statutes) to appoint “special attorneys” like himself… Upon review of the murky historical record, the Court determines that, whatever themes can be drawn from that background, they cannot supplant the plain language of the statute itself, which clearly does not vest the Attorney General with such authority,” she wrote.

“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—much less its acquiescence to Section 515 as a vehicle for such appointments,” she added.

In the end, the United States’ murky history of appointing special prosecutors in high-profile cases undid Smith’s ability to prosecute the former president on charges of mishandling classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Judge Cannon cites the 20th-century example of U.S. President Coolidge appointing a special counsel to examine the Teapot Dome scandal. In other instances, she writes, the special counsel was “appointed without any formal statutory or regulatory authority at all.”

The decision brings to an end one of President Trump’s three criminal trials he still faced following his conviction in the New York State hush-money case. Smith is still prosecuting Trump in the D.C. federal district on election interference charges related to the January 6th, 2021 riots at the Capitol, but defense attorneys are expected to file a speedy motion to dismiss that case as well.

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