Last year, Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned on a 38-count federal indictment in Florida, all stemming from his theft of thousands of highly classified documents as he exited the White House. Trump was stacking up nuclear secrets in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms and bringing MAL guests down to his storage room so he could show them all of the CIA and NSA files. When the Biden administration discovered that Trump had stolen all of these documents, Pres. Biden and AG Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate and prosecute the case. Jack Smith secured the indictment thirteen months ago. Unfortunately, the case was assigned to a Trump-appointee judge and moron named Aileen M. Cannon. Judge Cannon has been slow-walking the case and doing everything she can to hurt Smith’s prosecution of Trump. Now Judge Cannon has done the unthinkable… she’s dismissed the entire case.
A federal judge dismissed in its entirety the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump on Monday, ruling that the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had violated the Constitution.
In a stunning ruling, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, found that because Mr. Smith had not been named to the post of special counsel by the president or confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.
The ruling by Judge Cannon, who was put on the bench by Mr. Trump, flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era that upheld the legality of the ways in which independent prosecutors have been named. And in a single swoop, it removed a major legal threat against Mr. Trump on the first day of the Republican National Convention, where he is set to formally become the party’s nominee for president.
Mr. Smith’s team will almost certainly appeal the ruling by Judge Cannon throwing out the classified documents indictment, which charges Mr. Trump with illegally holding onto a trove of highly sensitive state secrets after he left office and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.
The Times pointed out in their live blog that Clarence Thomas “deeply questioned the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment” in the SCOTUS ruling about Trump’s immunity from prosecution. The Times also says that there’s room for Jack Smith to ask an appeals court to remove Judge Cannon, just as there’s room for an appeal to the Supreme Court. The same Supreme Court which just gave Trump an unprecedented amount of “presidential immunity.” Absolutely crazy times.
Photos courtesy of DOJ and Cover Images.