Federal judge dismisses Trump classified documents case, says special prosecutor was appointed illegally

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump in Florida dismissed the prosecution on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which can be appealed and may later be overturned by a higher court, brings at least for now a stunning and abrupt conclusion to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.

Though the case had long been stalled and the prospect of a trial before the November election already was an unrealistic scenario, the judge's order is a mammoth legal victory for Trump as he recovers from a weekend assassination attempt and prepares to accept the Republican nomination in Milwaukee this week.

It's the latest stroke of good fortune in the four criminal cases Trump has faced. Though he was convicted in May in his New York hush money trial, the sentencing there has been postponed since a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. That opinion will result in significant delays in a separate case brought by special counsel Jack Smith charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Another election subversion case filed by prosecutors in Atlanta has been delayed by revelations of a romantic relationship between the district attorney and a special prosecutor.

In a statement on his social media platform, Trump said that the dismissal “should be just the first step” and that the three other cases, which he called “witch hunts,” should also be dismissed.

The classified documents case had been seen as the most legally clear-cut of the four given the breadth of evidence that prosecutors say they had accumulated and since the conduct at issue occurred after Trump left the White House in 2021. The indictment included dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He had pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Defense lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including a legally technical one that asserted that special counsel Jack Smith had been illegally named to the position under the Constitution's appointments clause because he was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, rather than being confirmed by Congress, and that his office was improperly funded by the Justice Department.

“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in a 93-page order granting a defense request to dismiss the case.

“If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so," she added.

That mechanism is through congressional approval, she said.

The order is the latest example of the Trump-appointed judge handling the case in ways that have benefited the former president.

Even before the charges were filed, she generated intense scrutiny during the FBI's investigation when she appointed an independent arbiter to inspect the classified documents recovered during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, a decision that was overturned months later by a unanimous federal appeals panel.

Since then, she has been slow to issue rulings — favoring Trump's strategy of securing delays in all his criminal cases — and has entertained defense arguments that experts said other judges would have dismissed without hearings. In May, she indefinitely canceled the trial date amid a series of unresolved legal issues.

Smith's team had vigorously contested the appointments clause argument during hearings before Cannon last month, saying Justice Department leadership has full authority under its own regulations to name and fund a special counsel. They told the judge that even if she agreed with Trump, the proper correction would not be dismiss the case.

Prosecutors had also noted that Trump's position had been rejected in other courts involving other prosecutions brought by other Justice Department special counsels.

For instance, Trump-appointed judges in the federal tax and firearms cases against President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, dismissed similar arguments several months ago. The appointment of another special counsel, Robert Mueller, selected by Trump's Justice Department to investigate potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign, was also upheld as lawful by a District of Columbia judge.

But Cannon remained unpersuaded, and she called the prosecution's claims “strained.” The Trump team's position got a boost earlier this month in a Supreme Court ruling that conferred broad immunity on former presidents, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing a separate concurrence questioning whether Smith had been legally appointed.

No other justice signed on to the concurrence, which Thomas said he wrote to “highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.” Thomas wrote that lower courts should weigh whether the office had been “established by law,” and Cannon cited that concurrence several times in her order.

“Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution?” she said. “After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no.”

A spokesman for the Smith team did not immediately return a request seeking comment on Monday, and the Trump team did not immediately have a comment.

Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington contributed to this report.