Federal district judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the classified documents case against Donald Trump.
In a ruling Monday, Cannon said the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution.
“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,” Cannon wrote.
The earth-shattering ruling by Cannon, a judge Trump appointed in 2020, clears away one of the major legal challenges facing the former president, and comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Many legal experts had viewed the classified documents case as the strongest one of the four cases that were pending against the former president.
Smith had charged Trump last year with taking classified documents from the White House and resisting the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials. He pleaded not guilty.
In a separate criminal case brought by Smith against Trump in Washington, DC, the special counsel was pursuing federal charges stemming from Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump also faces a state-level election subversion case in Georgia and he was convicted of state crimes in New York earlier this year for his role in a hush money payment scheme before the 2016 election.
Trump’s efforts to dismiss the case under the appointments clause was seen as a long shot, as several special counsels – even during his own presidential administration – were run the same way.
But the fringe argument gained steam when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas threw his support behind the theory, writing in a footnote in the high court’s presidential immunity decision that there are “serious questions whether the Attorney General has violated that structure by creating an office of the Special Counsel that has not been established by law. Those questions must be answered before this prosecution can proceed.”
Still, Cannon held a hearing on the issue several weeks ago, pushing attorneys to explain exactly how Smith’s investigation into Trump was being funded. The judge’s questions were so pointed that special counsel attorney James Pearce argued that, even if Cannon were to throw out the case due to an appointments clause issue, the Justice Department was “prepared” to fund Smith’s cases through trial if necessary.
Smith’s office has not responded to a call for comment.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
