US judge tosses Trump's classified documents case over legality of special counsel appointment

A federal judge dismissed on Monday the classified documents case against ex-President Donald Trump, ruling that the appointment of the special counsel who was leading the case violated the Constitution.

District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that because Special Counsel Jack Smith was not appointed by President Joe Biden or confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unlawful. She also ruled that Smith's office was illegally funded, because it was granted a "permanent indefinite appropriation" by the Justice Department.

But Smith's appointment was in-line with those of other special counsels dating back three decades, and those who have been appointed since, including David Weiss, the prosecutor named to lead the prosecution of Hunter Biden.

Previous rulings have upheld the legality of the special counsel appointment process. It is unclear how Cannon's ruling could affect the case against the president's son, or other special counsel prosecutions.

"The Framers gave Congress a pivotal role in the appointment of principal and inferior officers. That role cannot be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere—whether in this case or in another case, whether in times of heightened national need or not," Cannon wrote.

"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. Perhaps this can be traced back to reliance on stray dictum in Nixon that perpetuated in subsequent cases," Cannon wrote in her ruling.

The judge was referring to the landmark case that led former President Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace.

The ruling is all but certain to be appealed by the Justice Department, setting up a likely challenge that will go all the way to the Supreme Court. But the further delay is all but certain to push the start of any trial well beyond November's presidential election with Trump consistently leading in nearly all national polling.

Trump faced a 37-count indictment related to his alleged efforts to keep classified documents in his personal possession after he left the White House in 2021, as well as later efforts to thwart federal investigators from recovering them. The former president pleaded not guilty.

The investigation kicked off after the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved 15 boxes of government files, including 184 classified documents, from Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in January 2022. It subsequently handed them over to the FBI as it referred the matter to the bureau.

Additional records were recovered when FBI agents executed a grand jury subpoena in May 2022. But investigators believed additional documents were likely still at Mar-a-Lago, prompting the execution of a court-approved search warrant in August that led to 11 additional sets of documents being seized.

Trump has maintained that the case is politically-motivated, a charge denied by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was tapped to independently carry out the federal probe by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022.