Trump-appointed judge tries to let Trump off for stealing state secrets

Now this is judicial activism—on steroids. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against convicted felon Donald Trump, dismissed all 40 criminal charges in that case—31 of which were brought under the Espionage Act. Her choice here is as lawless a decision as the Supreme Court’s recent declaration that the president is king. (Well, as long as the president is Trump.)

In fact, Cannon picked up where Justice Clarence Thomas left off in the Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump total immunity. In his concurrence, he went even further than his Trumpy fellow justices, saying, “I am not sure that any office for the Special Counsel has been ‘established by Law,’ as the Constitution requires.” Never mind that the Supreme Court had previously—and famously—decided otherwise.

Cannon’s dismissal, Slate’s legal expert Mark Joseph Stern writes, is an “extreme outlier view with no basis in precedent.” It didn’t just have no basis in precedent; it flies in the face of established law. As Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, writes, Thomas “laid the table and Judge Cannon took a seat.”