FL Judge Dismisses Trump Classified Documents Case

FLORIDA — In another blow for prosecutors who have scrutinized how Donald Trump handled records in and out of office, a judge threw out the case against the former president Monday on the grounds that the appointment of and funding for special counsel Jack Smith was illegal.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee to the bench, said in her 93-page decision that Smith's appointment was "unlawful" and unconditional. "The clerk is directed to close this case," Cannon wrote, according to NBC News.

The decision by Cannon brings ends 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, the Associated Press reports. Trump faced dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back.

Defense lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including one that asserted that 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 clerk is directed to close this case," the judge wrote.

Smith’s team is likely to appeal Cannon's dismissal of the charges, setting up a showdown in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, The New York Times reported. And the case may continue along with legal proceedings in Trump’s other federal case — which accuses him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election — until the Supreme Court renders its own decision on the issue.

The decision came on the first day of the Republican National Convention, and following an assassination attempt on the former president over the weekend.

Smith's team had argued a 1978 law — which requires presidents to return presidential records to the government upon leaving office but permits them to retain purely personal ones — has no relevance in a case concerning highly classified documents. Those records, prosecutors said, were clearly not personal and there is no evidence Trump ever designated them as such.

They said that the suggestion he did so was "invented" only after it became public that he had taken with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after his presidency boxes of records from the White House and that none of the witnesses they interviewed in the investigation support his argument.