The US federal judge presiding over the classified documents case of former president Donald Trump in Florida has dismissed the prosecution, siding with defence lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
The decision by US District Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday morning (just before midnight AEST) brings a stunning and abrupt conclusion to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats that the Republican former president confronted.
In one of four criminal cases against Trump, he had faced dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He had pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
Defence lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including a legally technical one that asserted that special counsel Jack Smith had been illegally appointed under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which governs the appointment of certain government positions, and that his office was improperly funded by the Justice Department.
“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in a 93-page order granting a defence request to dismiss the case.
“If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so,” she added.
That mechanism is through congressional approval, she said.
The order is the latest example of Cannon, a Trump appointee, handling the case in ways that have benefited the ex-president.
She generated intense scrutiny during the FBI’s investigation when she appointed an independent arbiter to inspect the classified documents recovered during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, a decision that was overturned months later by a unanimous federal appeals panel.
Since then, she has been slow to issue rulings — favouring Trump’s strategy of securing delays — and has entertained defense arguments that experts said other judges would have dismissed without hearings. In May, she indefinitely canceled the trial date amid a series of unresolved legal issues.
Smith’s team had vigorously contested the Appointments Clause argument during hearings before Cannon last month and told the judge that even if she ruled in the defense team’s favour, the proper correction would not be to dismiss the case. Smith’s team had also noted that the position had been rejected in other courts involving other prosecutions brought by other Justice Department special counsels.
But Cannon remained unpersuaded, and she called the prosecution’s claims “strained”.
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“Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorises the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution?” she said.
“After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no.”
A spokesman for the Smith team did not immediately return a request seeking comment on Monday, and the Trump team did not immediately have a comment.
