A federal judge in Florida threw out the prosecution of former President Donald Trump on Monday in the “documents” case because she ruled that Special Counsel Jack Smith had not been appointed in a constitutional or lawful manner.
Judge Aileen Cannon granted a defense motion after ruling that Smith, who was not confirmed by the U.S. Senate as other U.S. Attorneys have been in the past, could not lawfully bring the indictment against Trump in federal court.
“In the end, it seems the Executive’s growing comfort in appointing ‘regulatory’ special counsels in the more recent era has followed an ad hoc pattern with little judicial scrutiny,” Cannon wrote, according to a CNN report.
The stunning development came on the first morning of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and will excite an already emotional gathering in the wake of Trump’s attempted assassination Saturday.
As Breitbart News noted last month, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested in a concurring opinion in Fischer v. United States — which said the Department of Justice had abused its power in prosecuting January 6th defendants under a statute about witness tampering — that Smith’s appointment was likely unconstitutional. Smith’s took aim at Thomas’s arguments in an unrelated filing in the case last week, which raised some legal eyebrows.
Smith brought charges against Trump in Florida — the site of Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago — alleging that he had mishandled classified documents when he left office. Judge Cannon looked askance at the fact that Smith convened a grand jury in Washington, D.C. — a notoriously anti-Trump jurisdiction — rather than in Florida.
It is not clear if Cannon’s ruling affects Smith’s separate prosecution of Trump for January 6-related charges in Washington.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
