Aileen Cannon May Backfire As Jack Smith Appeals Trump Classified Docs Case Dismissal

Special Counsel Jack Smith made Trump's day worse by appealing Judge Aileen Cannon's dismissal of the classified documents case.

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Jack Smith Takes Apart Aileen Cannon’s Classified Docs Case Dismissal

Trump seems to have thought he was in the clear after Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the federal classified documents case against him, but he was wrong. The Special Counsel has appealed.

Here are a few choice sections from Smith’s argument:

The Attorney General validly appointed the Special Counsel, who is also properly funded. In ruling otherwise, the district court deviated from binding Supreme Court precedent, misconstrued the statutes that authorized the Special Counsel’s appointment, and took inadequate account of the longstanding history of Attorney General appointments of special counsels.

…

The district court’s contrary reasoning lacks merit. Its focus on the absence of the word “appoint” in Section 515(b) ignores that the term “retain” is synonymous with “appoint” as used Section 515—as the statute’s enactment history makes clear—and that the word “appoint” appears in Section 515(a), confirming that the statute provides appointment authority. The district court’s determination that the phrase “specially retained” in Section 515(b) is a past-tense verb that only applies to already-retained attorneys misunderstands the statute’s grammatical construction—“retained” and “appointed” are past participles that take their tense from the surrounding present-tense verbs—and results in a nonsensical interpretation under which an attorney must be hired and only then (potentially minutes later) could become “specially retained” as a special counsel.

Finally, the district court erroneously treated two provisions—28 U.S.C. §§ 519 and 543, which together clarify that the Attorney General’s supervision of all federal litigation encompasses U.S. Attorneys and any attorneys assisting them—as a limit on the entirely independent authority under Section 515 for an Attorney General to appoint a special counsel to assist him.

…

The district court erroneously disregarded this history as “spotty” or “ad hoc,” giving undue emphasis to superficial differences in the appointment and roles of certain special and independent counsels. The district court’s rationale could jeopardize the longstanding operation of the Justice Department and call into question hundreds of appointments throughout the Executive Branch.

In other words, Aileen Cannon invented an interpretation that allowed her to dismiss the charges against Trump, and if that interpretation were allowed to stand, it could jeopardize the functions of the Executive Branch and the DOJ.