Jack Smith argues that Judge Cannon erred in dismissing Trump document case

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is still beating a dead horse and claiming that former President Donald Trump's classified documents case should NOT have been dismissed by Judge Cannon, and many on the left are eating it up.

The long-time Trump prosecutor went so far as to urge a federal appeals court on Monday to allow him to take the case up again by reinstating the criminal charges against Trump, as POLITICO reported.

He cited the former presiden'ts possession of classified documents and alleged obstruction of a federal investigation into their presence at his Florida home.

After agreeing with Trump's legal team that the special counsel's appointment by Attorney General Merrick Garland was unlawful, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the lawsuit in July. Smith contended that Cannon committed a number of mistakes in that ruling.

The Ruling

On the same day that the former president landed in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention and days after surviving a would-be assassin’s gunshot, the Trump-appointed judge abruptly dismissed Smith’s case which had long been branded melicious prosecution on the part of the Justice Department.

The 2024 campaign saw three of Trump's four criminal prosecutions, including two from Smith, essentially sidestepped by a succession of court triumphs, the most recent of which being the most recent in this vein.

In his 81-page filing, Smith essentially restates the arguments that his prosecutors had already made to Cannon, claiming that she had used insignificant details to distinguish Smith's decision from many others over the years that had either affirmed or supported the broad discretion of the attorney general to select special counsels.

The special prosecutor who looked into Richard Nixon's Watergate crisis issued subpoenas, and the Supreme Court upheld those.

More of Smith's Case

“Congress has granted the Attorney General not only the power to appoint special counsels, but discretion to determine how much independence to give them,” Smith wrote in a brief that traces the history of such appointments back to the 1805s.

Even though Smith and Cannon have been at odds recently, Smith's brief was surprisingly restrained in its criticism of the judge's reasoning.

“The district court attached undue weight to several superficial variations in historical practice that shed no light on the question at hand,” Smith wrote.

However, while numerous Trump detractors have pushed for a change in trial court judges after Cannon's string of unusual rulings and delays favored the former president, but the prosecutor did not ask the appeals court to do so.