WASHINGTON Ƶ A federal judge in Florida dismissed on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which is expected to be appealed and may eventually be overturned by a higher court, brings at least for now a stunning and abrupt conclusion 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 already nonexistent, the judgeƵs order is a significant legal and political victory for Trump as he recovers from and prepares to accept the Republican nomination in Milwaukee this week.
ItƵs the latest stroke of good fortune in . He was , but the sentencing has been postponed after . That opinion will cause major delays in charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. 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 that the dismissal Ƶshould be just the first stepƵ and that the three other cases, which he called ƵWitch Hunts,Ƶ 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, , and because the conduct at issue occurred after Trump left the White House in 2021 and lost the powers of the presidency.
The indictment included dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He had pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
Defense lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including legally technical ones that asserted that violated the ConstitutionƵs Appointments Clause because it did not go through Congress and that SmithƵs office was improperly funded by the Justice Department. She said Garland had exceeded his bounds by appointing a prosecutor without Senate approval and confirmation and had undermined the authority of Congress.
ƵThe Special CounselƵs position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,Ƶ Cannon wrote in a 93-page order that granted the defense teamƵs request to dismiss the case but did not dissect the substance of the allegations against Trump.
ƵIf 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,Ƶ she added.
That mechanism is through congressional approval, she said.
The order is the latest example of the Trump-appointed judge handling the case in ways that have benefited the ex-president.
She generated intense scrutiny during the FBIƵs investigation when to inspect the classified documents recovered during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, a decision that .
Since the charges were filed, she has been slow to issue rulings Ƶ favoring TrumpƵs strategy of securing delays in all his criminal cases Ƶ and has entertained defense motions and arguments that experts said other judges would have dispensed with without hearings. In May, amid a series of unresolved legal issues.
SmithƵs team had vigorously contested the Appointments Clause argument during hearings before Cannon last month, saying Justice Department leadership has full authority to name and fund a special counsel. Attorneys general appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents have named special counsels without the permission of Congress, going back years.
Prosecutors had also noted that TrumpƵs position had been rejected in other courts involving other prosecutions brought by other Justice Department special counsels.
For instance, Trump-appointed judges in the against President Joe BidenƵs son, Hunter, dismissed similar arguments several months ago. The younger Biden was convicted of three felonies in the gun case in June and is scheduled for trial in September in the tax case.
The , selected by TrumpƵs Justice Department to investigate potential ties between Russia and TrumpƵs 2016 campaign, was also upheld as lawful by a District of Columbia judge.
But Cannon remained unpersuaded, and she called the prosecutionƵs claims Ƶstrained.Ƶ The Trump teamƵs position got a boost earlier this month in a Supreme Court ruling that said former presidents enjoy expansive immunity from prosecution, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing a separate concurrence questioning whether Smith had been legally appointed.
No other justice signed on to the concurrence, which Thomas said he wrote to Ƶhighlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.Ƶ Thomas wrote that lower courts should weigh whether the office had been Ƶestablished by law,Ƶ and Cannon cited that concurrence several times in her order.
ƵBoth the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution?Ƶ she said. ƵAfter careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no.Ƶ
A spokesman for the Smith team had no immediate comment.
