US Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday (15) dismissed the criminal case against former President Donald Trump involving confidential White House documents.
In the ruling, Cannon said the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the complaint, violated the Constitution.
“In the end, it appears that the Executive Branch’s increasing comfort with appointing ‘regulatory’ special counsels in the more recent era has followed an ad hoc pattern with little judicial scrutiny,” Cannon wrote.
The ruling by Cannon, a judge appointed by Trump in 2020, eliminates one of the biggest legal challenges faced by the former president and comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Many legal experts viewed the classified documents case as the strongest of the four criminal cases pending against the former president.
Smith accused Trump last year of taking classified White House documents and resisting government attempts to retrieve the materials. He has pleaded not guilty.
In a separate criminal case brought by Smith against Trump in Washington, D.C., the special counsel brought federal charges stemming from Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump also faces a state-level election subversion case in Georgia and was convicted of state crimes in New York earlier this year for his role in a scheme to pay bribes to porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Trump’s efforts to dismiss the criminal case under the appointments clause were seen as a long shot, given that several special counsels — even during his own administration — were appointed in the same way.
But the argument gained traction when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas threw his support behind the theory, writing in a footnote to the Court’s presidential immunity decision that there are “serious questions about whether the Attorney General violated that structure by creating an office of Special Counsel that was not established by law. Those questions must be answered before this prosecution can proceed.”
Still, Cannon held a hearing on the matter several weeks ago, pressing lawyers to explain exactly how Smith’s investigation into Trump was being funded.
The judge’s questions were so pointed that Special Counsel James Pearce argued that even if Cannon dismissed the case due to an appointments clause issue, the Justice Department was “prepared” to fund Smith’s cases through Justice if necessary.
Smith’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: CNN Brasil
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