The Trump Docket: Jack Smith could invoke ‘nearly 140 years’ of history to appeal Cannon Mar-a-Lago dismissal

Left to right: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, July 2024, in Milwaukee (AP Photo/Matt Rourke). The Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., June 2019 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite). Special counsel Jack Smith at a Department of Justice office in Washington, D.C., August 2023 (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).

After reveling over the dismissal of his indictment in Florida for allegedly failing to protect the nation’s secrets and then surviving an assassination attempt before being received at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential race, the turbulent waters in Donald Trump’s vast sea of indictments would seem to be receding. But with a formal notice to appeal the dismissal of the classified documents case entered this week, a new swell is building behind special counsel Jack Smith.

In March and again in June, Smith set down arguments opposing Trump’s bid to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that he was not constitutionally appointed. And it is in those documents that one may be able to divine what Smith’s appellate brief to the Eleventh Circuit may say.

At the very least, it’s bound to be a history lesson.

Cannon’s ruling was controversially received by analysts and legal experts alike because it flouted long-standing findings on the appointments and roles of special counsels and instead heavily relied on a sole concurring opinion issued by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to reach its end. Smith will likely be bound, as he wrote in March, to elaborate on the precedent that has spanned “nearly 140 years and include some of the most notorious scandals in the Nation’s history.”