Donald Trump’s criminal case on charges that he illegally retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club was dismissed after a judge ruled the special counsel who brought the prosecution had been improperly appointed.
US district judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Mr Trump, ruled that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed to his role and did not have the authority to bring the case as he had not been named to his post by the president or confirmed by the Senate.
The judge found that US atorney general Merrick Garland, who named Mr Smith in 2022 to oversee investigations involving Mr Trump, did not have the authority “to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith.”
The judge effectively ruled that there was no statute that authorised a special counsel to bring charges in the Trump case, and previous court rulings – including by the US supreme court in the landmark Richard Nixon case – were not binding on her decision.
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“Because Special Counsel Smith’s exercise of prosecutorial power has not been authorized by law, the court sees no way forward aside from dismissal of the superseding indictment,” the Florida judge wrote in the 93-page decision.
In the case, Mr Trump was indicted on charges that he wilfully retained sensitive national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after leaving office and obstructed government efforts to retrieve the material. Two others - Trump personal aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Olivera - were also charged with obstructing the investigation.
Monday’s ruling cast aside previous court decisions that upheld the use of special prosecutors stretching back to the Watergate era, and removed a major legal threat to Mr Trump on the opening day of the Republican national convention, where he was to accept the GOP nomination for president.
Prosecutors will almost certainly challenge the ruling at the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, and could ask the appeals court to reassign the case to a different federal judge in Florida if Judge Cannon’s decision is overturned.
Whether the 11th circuit overturns the decision could be as significant as the ruling itself. If the decision is reversed and a new federal judge takes control of the case, it could breathe new life into the case even if the case may not go to trial for years.
Mr Trump was indicted last year with retaining national security documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the US government’s attempts to retrieve, including by partially defying a grand jury subpoena ordering him to return any classified documents to the justice department. He had pleaded not guilty.
At issue is Mr Trump’s argument that the special counsel position was not a position created by statute by the constitution, and therefore any actions he took with that prosecutorial power were not authorised by law.
Prosecutors contended in response that the judge did not need to consider whether to toss the indictment since Mr Smith was an “officer”, deputised by the attorney general to prosecute the case as allowed under the appointments clause of the constitution.
The judge sided with Mr Trump’s position. She found that the appointments clause did not allow for the appointment of a prosecutor effectively working as something tantamount to a US attorney, a job that requires Senate confirmation, and the only remedy was to dismiss the indictment.
“All actions that flowed from his defective appointment including his seeking of the Superseding Indictment on which this proceeding currently hinges were unlawful exercises of executive power,” she wrote.
“Because Special Counsel Smith ‘cannot wield executive power except as article II provides,’ his attempts to do so are void and must be unwound. Defendants advance this very argument: ‘any actions taken by Smith are ultra vires ... And the court sees no alternative course to cure the unconstitutional problem.’”
Prosecutors had argued that they were funded by the justice department’s budget, through a mechanism called the “indefinite appropriation”, which was allowed because the special counsel was authorised under the appointments clause.
But Judge Cannon took her reasoning to its logical end to find that if Mr Smith’s appointment was invalid, then prosecutors could not rely on the appointment to justify using the “indefinite appropriation”. - Guardian