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Legal experts on Twitter are in wide agreement that US District Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to dismiss the classified documents case against Donald Trump is a great win for the rule of law, or as one scholar put it, “Suck it, libs.” Another idiot with a similar opinion was US Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) who welcomed Cannon’s First Day of the Republican National Convention present by saying, “It’s good to see some sanity returned to our judicial system.”
Another random Twitter user, one Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), exulted, “Dismissal of the Trump ‘classified documents’ case is a win for America — and a win for the rule of law.”
Why no, most didn’t offer much in the way of explanation beyond insisting that appointing a special counsel has to be illegal if that investigation looks at Trump. Also, “weaponized” Justice Department BAD. The closest thing to a defense of Cannon’s decision we could find was from Fox News legal doofus Jonathan Turley, who simply echoed the “reasoning” in Cannon’s ruling:
Well, what Judge Cannon is saying here is essentially, look, there’s this weird anomaly in the Constitution, we have a process of which U.S. attorneys are nominated, and they are then confirmed by the Senate. And yet the attorney general can just go on to any street in D.C. and pick any person and make them a special counsel with greater authority than the U.S. attorney.
And that’s what she’s trying to get at here, saying, where is the footprint for this in the Constitution? Where is the authority to create Jack Smith within the first three articles of the Constitution?
We are a doktor of rhetoric, not an attorney, but it seems to us that, as Yr Wonkette ‘splained right after Cannon’s ruling, maybe the authority comes from Congress, which in 1978 passed the “Ethics in Government Act,” setting up the rules for the attorney general to go on the streets of DC and find a random Burger King employee or long-serving prosecutor to be a Special Counsel. The law’s constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1988, in Morrison v. Olson. More recently, the DC Circuit dismissed a 2019 challenge to the appointment of Robert Mueller, noting that special counsels operate under the authority of the Attorney General, who is confirmed by Congress, so there.
But all that was in the Before Times. Turley blithely dismissed those decisions and the many other rejections of the argument as simply not serious, claiming that “Other courts have really dismissed this claim with very little briefing.”
Still, not everyone was delighted by the ruling. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green was only cautiously optimistic that this was good news for Real Americans:
Jack Smith and the weaponized DOJ has been dealt a major blow.
But the Democrats won’t stop.
They are going to keep going after every single one of us who opposes their agenda.
We have to keep pushing forward.
How true this is. What about the many other Americans who want to illegally take classified documents from the White House after their terms have ended and then lie and say they don’t have them and then refuse to give them back? Plenty of ordinary citizens probably have very good reasons to violate the Espionage Act.
Among the rabble who actually know law stuff, there was at least some hope that the 11th Circuit will reverse Cannon on appeal, because there’s that whole “this is a dumb claim that no court has ever bought” thing. Among them was Harvard Law prof Laurence Tribe, who twote that
Judge Cannon just did the unthinkable: She dismissed the Trump classified documents case on the repeatedly rejected basis that DOJ violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause by appointing Special Counsel Smith at all! DOJ must appeal right away. […] This finally gives Jack Smith an opportunity to seek her removal from the case. I think the case for doing so is very strong.
And while Cannon does appear to have been inspired by Clarence Thomas’s weird footnote to the Supremes’ recent Trump is Actually King Now, OK? decision, there’s also the lukewarm comfort that Thomas appeared to be the only nutcase who wants to eliminate all special counsels forever, if only because that would make prosecuting Joe Biden harder. Not that they need to be consistent if it comes to it.
In any case, it appears that Donald Trump no longer has to pretend that being shot/being shrapneled requires him to do that “national unity” thing anymore, which wasn’t a good fit for him anyway.
Best comment on Trump’s angry call for all his other cases to be dismissed came from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California), who twote thusly:
I knew this mad man would soon be back. He’s incapable of unifying peanut butter and jelly.
But clearly Swalwell doesn’t get it: We’re going to be so unified that nobody will dare disagree.
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