July 15, 2024, West Palm Beach, FL – United States District Court Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed all charges against Donald Trump in the Federal classified documents prosecution, finding that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment violates the Constitution.

You can read the decision HERE:

Docket # 23-CR-80101-AMC – Document 672 – Order Granting Motion to Dismiss Superseding Indictment Based on Appointments Clause Violation

In a 93-page decision, Judge Cannon wrote “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? After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no.”

Judge Cannon wrote that “since November 2022, Special Counsel Smith has been exercising ‘power that [he] did not lawfully possess.’ All actions that flowed from his defective appointment — including his seeking of the Superseding Indictment on which this proceeding currently hinges — were unlawful exercises of executive power. Because Special Counsel Smith ‘cannot wield executive power except as Article II provides,’ his ‘[a]ttempts to do so are void’ and must be unwound.”

She also found that “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.” 

These comments echo Supreme Court Clarence Thomas’ recent concurring opinion in the July 1, 2024 decision on the Trump election interference case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the President has some immunity for official acts taken while in office.

It is unclear how, or whether, this decision will affect the other pending Federal case in the District of Columbia Federal Court before Judge Tanya Chutkan.  Judge Cannon’s decision makes clear that it is confined only to the case pending in the Southern District of Florida.  However, Trump has moved to dismiss the Indictment in Washington D.C. on the same grounds as found by Judge Cannon.

It is also currently unclear whether the Government will appeal Judge Cannon’s ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

The case is marked CLOSED in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.  The case is United States v. Donald J. Trump, Docket # 9:23-CR-80101-AMC.