Justin Sullivan/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
- Donald Trump's criminal case for holding onto classified documents has been dismissed.
- The judge ruled that the appointment of Jack Smith as special prosecutor was unconstitutional.
- The decision will almost certainly be appealed and may reach the Supreme Court.
The federal judge overseeing former President Trump's criminal case for hoarding classified documents in Mar-a-Lago has dismissed the charges against him.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon — who was appointed to the bench by Trump while he was president — ruled Monday that the appointment of Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the prosecution, was unconstitutional.
The case was widely perceived to be the most straightforward of Trump's four criminal cases. Smith alleged that Trump took documents containing government secrets when he left the White House in January of 2021, storing many of them at his Mar-a-Lago club, where he lives.
Trump then repeatedly stonewalled federal agencies who tried to get the documents back, and directed his employees to lie and mislead federal investigators, prosecutors allege — leading to a dramatic FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.
Cannon's 93-page ruling Monday doesn't call any of those events into question. Rather, the Florida judge ruled that the appointment of Smith violated the US Constitition's appointments clause.
His Special Counsel role was created by Justice Department regulations. But someone with his legal powers needs to be given his powers by Congress, she wrote.
The only way to fix this, Cannon wrote, was to dismiss the indictment against Trump.
"For more than 18 months, Special Counsel Smith's investigation and prosecution has been financed by substantial funds drawn from the Treasury without statutory authorization, and to try to rewrite history at this point seems near impossible," Cannon wrote.
On Truth Social, Trump — recovering from an injury after he was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin Saturday — wrote that all four criminal cases against him should be dismissed, along with E. Jean Carroll's sexual abuse and defamation claims against him.
"As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts," he wrote.
Trump claimed without evidence that the cases were coordinated by the Justice Department and political in nature, even though the Manhattan and Georgia indictments were brought by local prosecutors, and a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her in a civil trial.
Cannon's Monday decision will almost certainly be appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and, after that, could be taken up by the US Supreme Court.
The legality of Justice Department special counsels has been the subject of some debate over the past two decades. The statute that governed the so-called independent counsels during the Iran-Contra affair during Ronald Reagan's presidency and the Whitewater controversy during Bill Clinton's presidency expired in 1999. Since then, the US Attorney General has appointed special counsels with less authority while relying on internal Justice Department regulations.
Defense lawyers in special counsel investigations have routinely argued the appointment of these newer special counsels is unconstitutional. Special counsels can empanel grand juries and bring indictments in any district in the country, effectively making them the kind of "Officer of the United States" as described by the Constitution's Appointments Clause that needs to be funded and given powers by Congress, they argue. This Justice Department has argued that the arrangement is permissible because special counsels are appointed and overseen by the Attorney General, who does have those powers.
In her ruling, Cannon took a broadside at the executive branch at large, writing that federal agencies in general should be cautious of appointing special counsels under their own internal regulations.
"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," she wrote.
When the US Supreme Court heard arguments on presidential immunity earlier this year, some legal groups and Trump's allies urged the court to consider special counsels as well.
The Supreme Court ultimately didn't hear arguments on the issue — although it found sweeping presidential immunity powers in criminal cases — but Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that he would find many types of special counsels unconstitutional.
None of the other eight justices signed onto Thomas's opinion. And lower courts have routinely upheld the legality of special counsels in cases involving Robert Mueller and others.
Cannon's decision may end up being good news for Hunter Biden, who was convicted of gun-related crimes last month in a case brought by Special Counsel David Weiss. His lawyers had signaled that, on appeal, they would challenge the legality of appointing a special counsel in the first place.
This story is breaking and will be updated.