Less than 48 hours after surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump obtained a major victory when federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed his classified documents case in Florida on Monday.
The criminal case alleged that Trump mishandled classified documents after exiting the White House and refused to comply with federal authorities requesting their return. Judge Cannon tossed out the case, ruling that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional and improper.
“Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the Motion,” Cannon announced early Monday morning, “the Court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme—the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law.”
Smith, who partisanly opposes Trump and continued to attack the former president on social media after the assassination attempt, was appointed to the case by Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland. According to Cannon, this appointment violates the Constitution’s appointments clause, which requires that “Officers of the United States” must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
“The Framers gave Congress a pivotal role in the appointment of principal and inferior officers,” she noted. “That role cannot be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere—whether in this case or in another case, whether in times of heightened national need or not. In the case of inferior officers, that means that Congress is empowered to decide if it wishes to vest appointment power in a Head of Department, and indeed, Congress has proven itself. . . capable of doing so in many other statutory contexts. But it plainly did not do so here, despite the Special Counsel’s strained statutory readings.”
Trump applauded the ruling on Truth Social, which he called “just the first step” “in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday.”
This is a developing story. Refresh for updates.
