The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump's classified documents trial in Florida dismissed the case against the former president Monday on the grounds that the appointment of and funding for special counsel Jack Smith were illegal.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee, said in her 93-page decision that Smith's appointment was "unlawful" and unconditional. "The clerk is directed to close this case," she wrote.
She issued the decision on the first day of the Republican National Convention, two days after an assassination attempt against Trump.
Trump praised the ruling in a statement that referred to Saturday's shooting and said other criminal cases against him should be tossed out, as well. A source who spoke directly with Trump said he was "surprised" but "very happy" with Cannon's decision.
Smith's team indicated it would appeal Cannon's 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," spokesperson Peter Carr said in a statement. "The Justice Department has authorized the Special Counsel to appeal the court’s order.”
Christopher Kise, an attorney for Trump, praised Cannon's ruling.
"Judge Cannon today restored the rule of law and made the right call for America," Kise said in a statement. "From the outset, the Attorney General and Special Counsel have ignored critical constitutional restrictions on the exercise of the prosecutorial power of the United States."
In an interview with NBC News, President Joe Biden said that he was “not surprised” by Cannon's "specious" decision to dismiss the case.
“The basis upon which the case was thrown out I find specious because I don’t agree with what Clarence Thomas’ dissent and/or the Supreme Court decision on immunity,” Biden said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special counsel in November 2022, tasking him with overseeing the federal investigations into Trump’s handling and retention of classified documents after he left office, as well as his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Trump’s lawyers argued in court papers filed in February that the appointments clause of the Constitution “does not permit the Attorney General to appoint, without Senate confirmation, a private citizen and like-minded political ally to wield the prosecutorial power of the United States. As such, Jack Smith lacks the authority to prosecute this action.”
The special counsel’s team contended that the attorney general has statutory authority to appoint “inferior officers” and that previous court decisions have affirmed the attorney general’s authority to appoint special counsels.
Cannon found the appointment was improper.
"Since November 2022, Special Counsel Smith has been exercising 'power that [he] did not lawfully possess.' All actions that flowed from his defective appointment — including his seeking of the Superseding Indictment on which this proceeding currently hinges — were unlawful exercises of executive power," she wrote.
The arguments by Trump’s legal team were raised unsuccessfully against previous special counsels, including Robert Mueller, who oversaw an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and David Weiss, the special counsel overseeing the Hunter Biden prosecution.
It's unclear whether Cannon's ruling could affect the cases against Biden, the president's son. In her decision, Cannon specifically contrasts Smith’s appointment with Weiss’, because Weiss was already a U.S. attorney and Smith was a private citizen by the time he was appointed.
Hunter Biden's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smith will be able to appeal the dismissal to the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. That court will certainly hear the case and most likely hold oral arguments. However, even if the appeal were to be heard on an expedited basis, and even if the appeals court were to overturn Cannon’s ruling, the ruling all but guarantees the classified documents case could not go to trial before the election.
The ruling doesn’t have any immediate impact on the federal election interference case. The only courts that can direct the judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, to rule in a particular manner are the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court.
Trump was first charged in the case in June 2023. The indictment accused him of lying and scheming to mislead federal investigators to retain sensitive materials that he knew were still classified after he left the White House.
The indictment alleged that the documents he took with him “included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the U.S. and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for a possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
In August 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant on Trump's Florida estate and found over 100 classified documents there, despite having been assured by Trump's attorneys that all such documents had been returned.
He was later charged with trying to obstruct the investigation. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
Cannon's involvement preceded Trump’s being charged. In 2022, she temporarily halted the FBI's review of the documents that had been recovered at Mar-a-Lago and granted Trump’s request for a special master to review the evidence.
A panel of appeals court judges overturned that ruling, suggesting Cannon had tried to “carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents.”
The criminal case was randomly assigned to Cannon after Trump was indicted, and she has repeatedly come under criticism from legal experts for her meandering approach to the case. It had at one point been scheduled to go to trial earlier this year, but Cannon postponed the trial date indefinitely, citing "myriad" pending motions in the case.
Cannon's ruling comes two weeks to the day after the Supreme Court issued a decision largely in Trump's favor in the federal election interference case. The ruling held that he had immunity for some of his conduct as president and that Chutkan would have to decide which of his actions were official presidential acts before the case proceeded.
The Washington case, which at one point had been scheduled to go to trial in March, had been stayed while the high court grappled with the immunity issue, and Chutkan will need to decide on the "official acts" questions before the case goes to trial, making it impossible for it to begin before the election. Trump's attorneys had not challenged Smith's appointment in that case but are likely to do so now given Cannon's ruling.
The immunity ruling is also likely to have some impact on Trump's state election interference case in Georgia, which has been stayed until at least October while an appeals court hears arguments on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from the case.
Trump was convicted in March of 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York, and he was originally scheduled to be sentenced last week. The judge in that case postponed the sentencing until at least September after Trump's attorneys filed papers arguing the conviction should be tossed out because of the immunity ruling. They said some of the evidence at trial involved Trump's official acts in the White House. The Manhattan district attorney's office is arguing against reversal or a new trial.
In an opinion concurring with the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested Smith's appointment as special counsel raised a potential violation of the Constitution’s provisions on appointment power.
“If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President,” Thomas wrote in his opinion, which Cannon cited three times in her ruling.
Trump's attorneys had flagged Thomas' opinion to Cannon last week, saying it “adds force to the motions relating to the Appointments and Appropriations Clauses.”
In a response Friday, Smith's office countered that the “single-Justice concurrence ... neither binds this Court nor provides a sound basis to deviate from the uniform conclusion of all courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel.”
