Judge dismisses Trump classified documents case

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

Even if Cannon’s ruling is ultimately overturned, the decision to dismiss Trump’s impeachment adds to a series of legal victories for him in recent weeks, including a sweeping Supreme Court ruling on July 1 granting 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 should also be thrown 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 unite to END all militarization of our justice system,” he wrote.

Trump’s legal team has long considered the classified documents case 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 were the ones they were most concerned about.

The former president was charged with 40 counts of illegally withholding classified defense information and obstructing government efforts to recover the material. Some of the documents found in an FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, his private home and club in Florida, contained information about top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials know nothing about them, The Washington Post reported last year.

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

The former president was convicted in May of falsifying documents to conceal a payment to an adult film actress to keep her quiet before the 2016 election, but he is now challenging that verdict and the indictment itself based on the Supreme Court’s immunity decision. Two other cases — his federal election interference case in D.C. and a similar state trial in Georgia — have been stalled by legal challenges and will also be affected by the immunity decision.

A spokesman for Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Cannon’s decision to dismiss the charges in Florida. In a 93-page ruling, the judge wrote that the issue of a special prosecutor was novel and needed to be decided before the prosecution could move forward.

“After careful consideration of the fundamental challenges raised in the Motion, the Court is convinced that Special Prosecutor Smith’s prosecution of this action violates two structural pillars of our constitutional scheme: Congress’s role in appointing constitutional officers and Congress’s role in authorizing spending by statute,” Cannon concluded in his 93-page order.

Cannon concluded that the Justice Department has appointed special prosecutors inconsistently, saying that “the lack of consistency makes it nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusions about Congress’s approval of modern special prosecutors like Special Counsel Smith.”

He said Smith’s degree of autonomy made him a different kind of prosecutor.

“Indeed, very few historical special prosecutors resemble Special Prosecutor Smith. For one thing, the title ‘special prosecutor’ is of fairly recent origin. Special prosecutor-like figures have had many titles over the decades,” Cannon wrote. “In the Court’s view, this is not an insignificant semantic detail.”

The legal theory that Smith was illegally appointed and funded has been widely viewed as implausible. Trump’s legal team did not adopt the argument in court until conservative legal groups pushed it.

The former president’s lawyers did not make a similar request to dismiss Trump’s federal election interference case in D.C., even though Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to oversee that case in the same manner as the Florida case.

But the legal argument gained further traction this month after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the presidential immunity case that the special counsel’s office should be established by Congress and that Smith He needed to be confirmed by the Senate.

Thomas urged lower courts to weigh in on the issue. The judge wrote that he had added his concurring opinion to the immunity ruling to “highlight another way in which this proceeding may violate our constitutional structure.”

Last month, just weeks before Thomas issued his ruling, Cannon held two hearings on the special counsel’s appointment. During the hearing, it was unclear what his ruling would be, but he acknowledged that precedent appeared to support Garland’s appointment of Smith and that there would be a high legal hurdle to overturning it.

The crux of Trump’s argument is that because Garland has repeatedly said Smith is acting independently in overseeing the investigation, the special counsel should be considered a “principal officer” — a senior government official who has no immediate supervisor and whose appointment requires Senate approval.

The special counsel team responded that Smith, like other special counsels before him, is not a principal. The team said that while federal regulations state that Garland does not supervise special counsels on a day-to-day basis, the attorney general ensures that they follow Justice Department protocols and can review major investigative steps.

In an unusual move, Cannon invited outside groups to participate in the hearings and offer their arguments for and against Smith’s appointment.

“What do you think about this potentially condoned practice?” Cannon asked outside counsel Gene Schaerr, noting that previous attorneys general have made appointments similar to Garland’s appointment of Smith.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.