Aug. 26 (UPI) — Special counsel Jack Smith filed a brief Monday to revive the documents case against former President Donald Trump, arguing that U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon “was wrong” when she dismissed the case last month.
According to the 58-page brief filed with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith accused Cannon of having “erred” when she tossed the case after ruling the special counsel had been unlawfully appointed.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges related to holding classified documents from the White House at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Cannon ruled in July that Smith’s prosecution of Trump was illegitimate because it violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Cannon argued Smith was unlawfully appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland because he was never confirmed to his position by the U.S. Senate.
While Monday’s filing does not call for Cannon to be removed from the case, Smith claimed Cannon’s ruling “conflicts with an otherwise unbroken course of decisions, including by the Supreme Court, that the Attorney General has such authority, and it is at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government.”
Challenges to special counsel authority have failed in court since the 1974 Supreme Court ruling addressing the investigation into former President Richard Nixon.
“The district court deviated from binding Supreme Court precedent, misconstrued the statutes that authorized the special counsel’s appointment and took inadequate account of the longstanding history of Attorney General appointments of special counsels,” Smith’s team wrote Monday.
Prosecutors also wrote that “every court to consider the question has concluded that the Supreme Court’s determination that those statutes authorized the Attorney General to appoint the Watergate Special Prosecutor was necessary to the decision that a justiciable controversy existed and therefore constitutes a holding that binds lower courts.”
If the Appeals court reverses Cannon’s ruling, it could ask the judge to recuse herself from the case.
Trump’s legal team now has 30 days to file their reply to Smith’s brief.
