Judge dismisses classified documents case against Trump

So, Biden can announce he is suspending the 2024 Presidential election. It's an official act.
No more Trump, yay!

 

SCOTUS: "Well now, wait a minute. that's, er, not the kind of thing we meant by duties. Not until our guy is back in office anyway."

 

And then that opponent can spend four years lying that they were robbed and everything was rigged against them in order to sow doubt among Americans that their elections are legitimate!

Damned if you do, damned if you don't so I guess the conservative minority in this country should just be allowed to win!

 

A partisan judge repaying trump for her gig. Political corruption.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aileen...l-counsel-a54b1eee?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s

Judge Cannon Cashiers Jack Smith
The judge says the special counsel was unlawfully appointed, and she makes a strong case.
By The Editorial Board
July 15, 2024 at 5:54 pm ET

The Democratic election strategy of defeating Donald Trump with lawfare took another blow on Monday when a federal judge tossed special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment in the documents case on grounds that he was unduly appointed. It’s an important teaching moment about the Constitution.

The Appointments Clause sets a default rule that all “Officers of the United States” must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It also says “Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in Heads of Departments.”

Looking for political insulation, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr. Smith, a former U.S. Attorney then working at The Hague, to investigate Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The AG said DOJ regulations and four general department statutes authorized Mr. Smith’s appointment.

But Judge Aileen Cannon says the Constitution doesn’t let the AG use internal regulations to appoint a special counsel. Nor does any law let the AG appoint an outside attorney “with the full power and authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions” of a current U.S. Attorney.

Mr. Smith argued that special counsels have been used throughout history, and Congress has acquiesced to their appointment. Not so fast. “Very few historic special attorneys resemble Special Counsel Smith,” Judge Cannon notes. Congress in the past has also enacted laws establishing such offices like the 1978 independent counsel statute, which lapsed in 1999.

The judge declined to settle whether Mr. Smith constitutes an inferior or principal officer since he was inappropriately appointed either way. Her decision means that all legal actions that Mr. Smith has taken related to the documents case are void, though her ruling doesn’t extend to his Jan. 6 prosecutions in Washington, D.C.

Democrats have attacked Judge Cannon because she is a Trump appointee, but her opinion is well-reasoned. It also draws on constitutional history, noting that the Framers because of their “colonial experience with the English monarch” deliberately gave Congress a say in appointments to “limit executive aggrandizement.” By usurping “important legislative authority,” she writes, the special counsel’s office threatens “the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers.”

President Biden on Sunday night said the “founders understood the power of passion, and so they created a democracy that gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force.” He’s right, but those checks and balances include the Appointments Clause.

These institutional protections keep each branch of government in its lane and would protect against abuses by a re-elected President Trump. If upheld on appeal, Judge Cannon’s ruling would stop a Trump AG from tapping an outside attorney to investigate Mr. Biden and other political opponents.

There’s also nothing to stop Mr. Biden and Congress from enacting a law authorizing the AG to appoint a special counsel with circumscribed powers. Or Mr. Garland can hand the documents case to a U.S. Attorney who has been confirmed by the Senate.

We warned that Mr. Garland’s appointment of Mr. Smith was a mistake. It wouldn’t separate him from any decision to prosecute, nor change the inherently political nature of his decision to prosecute. Court defeats in Mr. Smith’s two prosecutions have borne this out. Mr. Smith’s main accomplishment has been to rally Republicans around Mr. Trump.

If only Mr. Biden, in his otherwise welcome exhortation to the country on Sunday, had promised to resolve political disagreements democratically rather than with lawfare.

Appeared in the July 16, 2024, print edition as 'Judge Cannon Cashiers Jack Smith'.


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Here I'm reading just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.

To top it off, the electorate didn't hand him sweeping down ballot victories in the House or Senate, which would've been worse if the 2 runoffs in Georgia swung Republican.

It takes more than a 6 million vote margin of victory to make his win look easy.

That suspicion now follows with all appointees for life.

When sleeze starts at the top, why assume the lower courts have to aspire to be any better?

 

Its sad that only .1% of the vote matters.

 

0.03%, actually.

 

This is messed up. This isn't her job, correct? You follow the Supreme Court precedent until it's appealed all the way up and then SCOTUS may give a different interpretation of the Constitution. District judges are not Supreme Court judges. Even though she comes from an appellate background, she's no longer an appellate judge.

Also, isn't this article being disingenuous? The AG could have charged it himself, but it was to make it less political, not more, right?

 

Goodness, I love watching the liberals' lawfare strategy blow up in their faces. They abused the legal system for what they thought would be political gain. Instead, they overplayed their hand, made Trump look like a sympathetic victim, and are now way behind in the Presidential race as a result. Then one of their donors tried to murder President Trump and they fell FURTHER behind in the polls. Corrupt, deranged people getting what's owed to them... good news is that the country and democracy stand to benefit by ejecting the corrupt President Biden and putting in his place President Trump. We can restore faith and confidence in our government institutions again -- after Biden abused almost all of them to go after his political opponent.

 

the fact that Congress let the independent council statute expire is an expression of their will, and the appointment of a "special council" was always an end-run to achieve the same effect without Congressional authorization

 

The special counsel isn’t the same as the previous Independent Counsel which operated independently of the Executive Branch. The special counsel still answers to the AG and is part of the executive branch.

 

if they answer to the AG, what function do they serve differently than a Senate-confirmed prosecutor?

 

helpful summary of the history behind the ruling

https://theconversation.com/trump-a...l-counsels-have-been-authorized-before-234763

28 minutes ago
Trump-appointed federal judge rules Trump’s classified document case is unconstitutional – here’s how special counsels have been authorized before
by Joshua Holzer, Assistant Professor, Westminster College

The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump dismissed the case on July 15, 2024.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, ruled that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution, was unlawfully appointed to his role and did not have the authority to bring the case.

Here’s how the federal government has used special counsels in high-profile investigations over the years, and how Cannon’s ruling, which Smith said he is appealing, would affect ongoing and future cases.

A brief history of independent counsels
Ensuring impartiality in the U.S. Justice Department can be difficult, as the attorney general is appointed by – and answerable to – a partisan president. This gives presidents the power to try to influence the attorney general to pursue a political agenda.

President Richard Nixon did this during the investigation of the Watergate break-in, which threatened to implicate him in criminal acts and end his presidency.

On the evening of Oct. 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, whom Richardson had appointed to lead the Watergate investigation. Richardson refused and resigned.

Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. Finally, Nixon ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork, the next most senior official at the Justice Department, to fire Cox. Bork complied.

This dramatic series of events, often referred to as the Saturday Night Massacre, demonstrated how presidents could exercise political power over federal criminal investigations.

After the Watergate scandal, Congress considered legislation to make the Justice Department into an independent agency in order to better insulate it from presidential influence.

This would have been in line with what many of the founders originally intended. But Congress decided on more modest reform and passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which was enacted by President Jimmy Carter and created the Office of Independent Counsel.

This allowed for investigations into misconduct that could operate outside of presidential control because the attorney general could ask a special three-judge panel to appoint an independent counsel to investigate.

The Ethics in Government Act also disqualified Justice Department employees, including the attorney general, from participating in any investigation or prosecution that could “result in a personal, financial, or political conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof” for the investigator.

US Supreme Court already has backed counsels
A few years later, the Reagan administration argued that independent counsels were unconstitutional. Its reasoning: the act violated the appointments clause of Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, which states that “Officers of the United States” are “appointed by the President” and “subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.”

In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that independent counsels were constitutional, as the appointment clause also states that “Congress may vest the appointment of inferior officers in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.”

In essence the Supreme Court determined that appointees can be considered either “principal” and must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, or “inferior,” which could be appointed by a department head, such as the attorney general, or judges.

The Supreme Court ruled that an “independent counsel should be considered an inferior rather than a principal officer.”

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more

 

conclusion

Creation of special counsels
In 1999, the Ethics in Government Act – which had a sunset clause – needed to be renewed.

By that point, both political parties and their presidents had been humiliated by prior independent counsel investigations. Republicans were reeling from the Iran-Contra scandal, while Democrats were embarrassed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It was also unclear which party would win the White House in the upcoming 2000 election, and neither party wanted the other to have any future advantage. During this standoff, both parties decided to simply let the Ethics in Government Act expire, thereby ending the possibility of appointing future independent counsels.

Later that year, then-Attorney General Janet Reno authorized the appointment of what she called special counsels, who could investigate certain sensitive matters, similar to the way independent counsels operated.

Robert Mueller was a special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in 2017 to investigate possible Russian interference in the 2016 elections and possible links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

John Durham was appointed in 2020 by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the origins of the investigation that triggered Mueller’s appointment.

In 2022, Jack Smith was appointed special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee investigations into former President Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well as Trump’s handling of classified government documents upon leaving office in 2021.

In 2023, Robert Hur was appointed by Garland as special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents after leaving office as vice president in 2017.

Also in 2023, David Weiss was appointed by Garland as special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s illegal purchase of a firearm as well as tax-related problems.

Effects beyond Trump
In early July, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that past, current and future presidents have partial immunity from prosecution.

While the legality of special counsels was not at issue in this case, Justice Clarence Thomas used his concurring opinion to challenge the legality of Smith’s appointment. Thomas argued that Congress has not passed any legislation that gives the attorney general the power to appoint a special counsel.

Thomas noted that the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 “had lapsed, and Congress has not since reauthorized the appointment of an independent counsel.” As such, Thomas questioned the power of attorneys general to appoint special counsels.

In her 93-page order dismissing the case against Trump, Judge Cannon echoed Thomas’ argument.

Cannon asked if there were “a statute in the U.S. Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution?”

She then answered her own question.

“After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no,” she wrote.

Cannon’s decision can be appealed to the Supreme Court. If that happens, the outcome could affect more than just Trump’s classified documents case.

Under Cannon’s ruling, any and all special counsels, including those that have investigated Joe and Hunter Biden, could also be deemed unconstitutional.

Editor’s note: This story incorporates material from an earlier story published on Dec. 14, 2022.


Joshua Holzer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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We can officially declare that lawfare against Trump is dead. What juror in the country other than these TDS turds in here they can can get to convict a man that was saved by God?

 

Are you saying @Commodore is **** posting about things he has no understanding?

Just asking questions.

 

It appears like the SCOTUS will need to legislate from the bench, after slow walking their decision.

Neal K. Katyal writing for The New York Times

Since 1966, Congress has had a specific law, Section 515, giving the attorney general the power to commission attorneys “specially retained under authority of the Department of Justice” as “special assistant(s) to the attorney general or special attorney.” Another provision in that law said that a lawyer appointed by the attorney general under the law may “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal,” that other U.S. attorneys are “authorized by law to conduct.” [...]

Eight separate judges had already rejected the claim that Judge Cannon has now endorsed (including, by the way, the judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s criminal case). It is true that one Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, recently wrote a concurring opinion in the Trump immunity case questioning the legality of the position of special counsel. No other justice joined that opinion, and even Justice Thomas did not come to the conclusions that Judge Cannon did — he simply raised “essential questions” about the office. And his questions ignored a well-trod tradition in America as well as the statutory landscape.

We’ve had special counsels and special prosecutors since at least the time of President Ulysses Grant after the Civil War. That is for a simple reason: We need a system to police high-level executive branch wrongdoing, and the system can’t be run by the president and his appointees alone.[/S][/S]​

 

and if Trump loses the election
there 6 people will overturn it

Rocket River

 

What's needed and what has been authorized by Congress are two different things. Jack Smith was not confirmed by Congress to lead prosecutions.