Florida judge throws out classified documents case against Trump

By Kazeem Ugbodaga

Florida Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday threw out the classified documents case against former U.S. President, Donald Trump.

Cannon said the justice department’s appointment of special prosecutor Jack Smith violated the U.S. Constitution.

She did not rule on whether Trump’s behavior was legal.

The dismissal comes following Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ criticism of Smith’s appointment in the presidential immunity case, the CNN reports.

“The bottom line is this: the Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers…,” she says.

The judge said Smith’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 added, “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.”

The FBI had executed a search warrant in August 2022 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that might have been brought there.

According to CNN, this was an extraordinary and historic move to search the home of a former president.

Before the initial charges against Trump were brought in June 2023, officials had tried —and failed — throughout 2021 and 2022 to get back the documents in Trump’s possession.

The National Archives, which is charged with collecting and sorting presidential material, said in early 2022 that at least 15 boxes of White House records were recovered from the estate, including some that were classified.

The government’s efforts culminated in the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, in which federal agents seized thousands of documents, about 100 of which were marked as classified.

Jack Smith was made special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into both the documents matter and Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election.

However, reacting to the judgement, Trump said the shelving of his classified documents case “should be just the first step,” and called for the other cases against him on business fraud and election subversion to also be dismissed.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the Justice Department “coordinated all of these political attacks, which are an election interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s political opponent, me.”

Ahead of his appearance at the Republican National Convention, Trump also urges his supporters to “come together to end all weaponization of our justice system.”