Classified Documents Case: Another Huge Legal Win For Donald Trump

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Two weeks ago, the U.S. supreme court issued a significant ruling related to presidential immunity. Tucked within that 6-3 decision, our audience may recall, was a concurring opinion from justice Clarence Thomas which took direct aim at the authority of the special prosecutor currently spearheading multiple cases against former president Donald Trump.

“I write separately to highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure,” Thomas wrote (.pdf). “In this case, the attorney general purported to appoint a private citizen as special counsel to prosecute a former president on behalf of the United States. But, I am not sure that any office for the special counsel has been ‘established by law,’ as the Constitution requires.”

According to Thomas, “if Congress has not reached a consensus that a particular office should exist, the executive lacks the power to unilaterally create and then fill that office.”

This week, those chickens came home to roost when U.S. district court judge Aileen M. Cannon – a Trump appointee – dismissed a classified documents case brought against the former president by special prosecutor Jack Smith. According to Cannon’s order of dismissal, Smith’s November 2022 appointment as special prosecutor by attorney general Merrick Garland “violates the appointments cause of the United States Constitution.” She further opined his office’s “use of a permanent indefinite appropriation also violates the appropriations clause.”

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Later in her 93-page ruling, Cannon claimed the government’s attempt to “shoehorn appointment authority” for such a position “threatens to undermine the basic separation-of-powers principles that give life and content to the appointments clause” while also destabilizing “Congress’s carefully crafted statutory structure” for the Department of Justice (DOJ).

“Congress has carefully enacted a statutory scheme, consistent with the appointments clause, governing the appointment of high-level federal prosecutors,” Cannon wrote.

Going outside of that structure, she argued, would “circumvent this statutory scheme and appoint one-off special counsels to wield the immense power of a United States attorney.” This would, in turn, “strip from Congress its role … in a highly sensitive area involving ‘life, liberty and reputation.'”

Smith charged Trump (.pdf) last June with 38 counts of seven different federal crimes: Willful retention of national defense information, the corrupt concealment of documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal documents and making false statements and representations.

Those indictments marked the first time in American history a former president had been charged with a federal crime. They also marked the first time a sitting president’s DOJ had indicted his top political rival in an upcoming election.

The former president and 2024 GOP nominee faced up to 100 years behind bars if convicted on all of those charges.

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RELATED | WHILE AMERICA TEETERS ON THE BRINK …

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Trump – who survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on Saturday – praised the ruling.

“As we move forward in uniting our nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the lawless indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the witch hunts,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these political attacks, which are an election interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s political opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all weaponization of our justice system, and Make America Great Again!”

According to legal analyst Jonathan Turley, Cannon cited “the same constitutional flaw that led Justice Clarence Thomas to expressly raise this issue in his recent opinion.”

Trump is not the only president to avoid prosecution regarding classified documents. In February of this year, special prosecutor Robert Hur announced he would not be prosecuting president Joe Biden on similar grounds because the incumbent was too old and “would likely present himself to a jury … as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur wrote in his report (.pdf).

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THE ORDER …

(U.S. District Court)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …

Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina and before that he was a bass guitarist and dive bar bouncer. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.

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