CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour interviewed Georgetown Law Professor of National Security Law Neal Katyal and asked for his first reaction to Judge Aileen Cannon‘s decision to dismiss former President Donald Trump’s documents case in Florida.
Note: Trump was accused of taking highly classified documents from the White House and keeping them at his golf club resort Mar-a-Lago and then, according to Katyal, “lied about it to federal investigators after he was asked about these documents. And that’s what he’s indicted for.”)
Katyal, who served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States during the Obama administration and who was Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice, said he was surprised by the decision.
“This decision is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” As a young DOJ staffer, @neal_katyal helped write the Special Counsel regulations. Now he tells me that Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to invalidate Special Counsel Jack Smith’s authority is “not going to stand.” pic.twitter.com/eb2Ik873Z8
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) July 16, 2024
Katyal told Amanpour: “I think, Christiane, this decision is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and it’s not going to stand and be upheld by the Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court.” Katayl added, “It’s certainly going to delay things in this case, and certainly past the election because appeals take time.”
[Katyal also penned an op-ed essay in The New York Times on Monday titled, ‘The Dismissal of the Trump Classified Documents Case Is Deeply Dangerous.’]
When Katyal was a young DOJ staffer in 1999, he helped write the special counsel regulations, which later guided Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and validated Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s authority in the MAL mishandling documents case.
Katyal, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, represented Vice President Al Gore as co-counsel in Bush v. Gore, and while serving at the DOJ successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court including the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Northwest Austin v. Holder and in favor of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.