A Florida federal judge, giving Donald Trump a huge legal victory that might only be temporary, on Monday dismissed all 40 criminal charges in the Mar-a-Lago case involving the former President’s handling of secret government documents.
That is expected to set up a swift appeal to higher courts by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, whose appointment to investigate Trump was ruled unconstitutional in the new decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon of West Palm Beach, Fla. If his appointment is upheld and the case moves on, Judge Cannon might be removed from handling it any further.
If, however, the appointment is ruled invalid, the Justice Department has other ways to bring charges again. Since the Mar-a-Lago case has not resulted in an explicit ruling that he is innocent, there is no bar to starting over because there is as yet no “double jeopardy” problem under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. (“Double jeopardy” is being tried twice for the same crime.)
So far, Trump has been tried in one of the four cases against him: a New York state case. He was convicted of 34 counts in May. The three other cases, two involving alleged crimes related to the 2020 election and the Florida sensitive documents case, have not yet gone to trial. The Mar-a-Lago case was once thought by legal analysts as the strongest of the cases against Trump, and of profound importance because of the risks to national security.
Judge Cannon’s 93-page decision, reached 13 months after the Mar-a-Lago charges were first filed and almost five months after Trump challenged the basis for Smith’s appointment, relied directly on the clause in the Constitution that spells out the ways in which officers of the national government are chosen.
That clause, the judge wrote, “is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of appointment power.”
Under the clause, one path to appointment is for the President to name an officer who then must win approval by the Senate. The other way is for the head of a federal agency to name an “inferior” officer, but only if there is a specific law that authorizes such an appointment.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland relied on the second method, treating Smith’s role as a prosecutor as an “inferior” officer within the Justice Department, relying upon four federal laws that, he said, allowed him to do so.
The judge accepted, with some reluctance, the designation of Smith’s job as an “inferior” one, but found none of the laws supported the appointment.
Based upon those interpretations, Cannon ruled that Smith had no authority to prosecute Trump for violating the federal Espionage Act and other federal laws when he took classified documents with him when he left office, refused to return them to the government when required to do so, and mishandled them in the way they were kept at his private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Cannon also ruled that the way the government was financing Smith’s work was unconstitutional, but said that did not need a separate remedy since the charges failed under the appointments provisions. The ruling, besides nullifying the charges against Trump, also dismissed them against two of his employees at Mar-a-Lago.
Attorney General Garland named Smith in November 2022, soon after Trump announced that he would seek election to the Presidency again in 2024. Garland wanted an independent prosecutor, because the probe would involve a rival to President Biden in the 2024 campaign.
A grand jury initially approved 37 charges in June of last year, then added three more in July of last year.
At one point, the Mar-a-Lago case had been scheduled to begin in May, but Judge Cannon put it off after pre-trial issues piled up and she delayed in deciding them. She held hearings last month on Trump’s challenge to the Smith appointment
Until Smith launches an appeal, Monday’s ruling means that the Florida case is formally closed. The judge’s order cancelled all other scheduled proceedings, and ordered that steps she had taken to protect classified documents in the case from being disclosed would remain in place.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on the validity of Smith’s appointment, although a challenge to it was made by conservative activists when the Justices were considering Trump’s claim to legal immunity to all criminal prosecutions. The immunity decision emerged two weeks ago, strongly in favor of Trump’s position.
Although the immunity decision did not mention the challenge to Smith’s post, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate opinion speaking for himself, raised questions about that. Judge Cannon, in her opinion Monday, cited Thomas five times as one of the authors of positions she found to support her ruling.
Some of the same conservative figures who made that claim in the immunity case, including former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, supported Trump’s challenge to Smith in the Mar-a-Lago case.
