Federal judge dismisses Trump classified documents case over concerns with prosecutor's appointment

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

Hours later, special counsel Jack Smith's office said it would appeal the order, which could result in it eventually being overturned by a higher court. But for now at least, the dismissal by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon brings a stunning and abrupt halt to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.

Though the case had long been stalled, and the prospect of a trial before the November election already nonexistent, the judge's order is a significant legal and political victory for Trump as he recovers from a weekend assassination attempt and prepares to accept the Republican nomination in Milwaukee this week.

It's the latest stroke of good fortune in the four criminal cases Trump has faced. He was convicted in May in his New York hush money trial, but the sentencing has been postponed after a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. That opinion will cause major delays in a separate case charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Another election subversion case filed in Atlanta has been delayed by revelations of a romantic relationship between the district attorney and a special prosecutor she hired for the case.

In a statement on his social media platform, Trump said the dismissal “should be just the first step” and the three other cases, which he called “Witch Hunts,” should also be thrown out.

The classified documents case had been seen as the most legally clear-cut of the four given the breadth of evidence that prosecutors say they had accumulated, including the testimony of close aides and former lawyers, and because the conduct at issue occurred after Trump left the White House in 2021 and lost the powers of the presidency.

The indictment included dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He had pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Defense lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including legally technical ones that asserted that special counsel Jack Smith's appointment by Attorney General Merrick Garland violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause because it did not go through Congress and that Smith's office was improperly funded by the Justice Department.

Cannon agreed, writing Monday that Garland had exceeded his bounds by appointing a prosecutor without Senate approval and confirmation and had undermined the authority of Congress.

“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in a 93-page order that granted the defense team's request to dismiss the case but did not dissect the substance of the allegations against Trump.

“If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so," she added.

That mechanism is through congressional approval, she said.

A spokesman for Smith, Peter Carr, said the Justice Department had authorized an appeal.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a special counsel,” Carr said in a statement.

President Joe Biden said Monday in an interview with NBC News that he wasn’t surprised by the decision to dismiss the case, but “the basis upon which the case was thrown out I find specious.”

The order is the latest example of the Trump-appointed judge handling the case in ways that have benefited the ex-president.

She generated intense scrutiny during the FBI's investigation when she appointed an independent arbiter to inspect the classified documents recovered during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, a decision that was overturned months later by a unanimous federal appeals panel.

Since the charges were filed, she has been slow to issue rulings — favoring Trump's strategy of securing delays in all his criminal cases — and has entertained defense motions and arguments that experts said other judges would have dispensed with without hearings. In May, she indefinitely canceled the trial date amid a series of unresolved legal issues.

Smith's team had vigorously contested the Appointments Clause argument during hearings before Cannon last month, saying Justice Department leadership has full authority to name and fund a special counsel. Attorneys general appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents have named special counsels without the permission of Congress, going back years.

Prosecutors had also noted that Trump's position had been rejected in other courts involving other prosecutions brought by other Justice Department special counsels.

For instance, Trump-appointed judges in the federal tax and firearms cases against Biden's son, Hunter, dismissed similar arguments several months ago. The younger Biden was convicted of three felonies in the gun case in June and is scheduled for trial in September in the tax case.

The appointment of another special counsel Robert Mueller, selected by Trump's Justice Department to investigate potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign, was also upheld as lawful by a District of Columbia judge.

But Cannon remained unpersuaded, and she called the prosecution's claims “strained.” The Trump team's position got a boost this month in a Supreme Court ruling that said former presidents enjoy expansive immunity from prosecution, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing a separate concurrence questioning whether Smith had been legally appointed.

No other justice signed on to the concurrence, which Thomas said he wrote to “highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.” Thomas wrote that lower courts should weigh whether the office had been “established by law,” and Cannon cited that concurrence several times in her order.

“Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution?” she said. “After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no.”

Trump lawyer Chris Kise praised Cannon for what he said was a “courageous and correct decision.”

“Judge Cannon today restored the rule of law and made the right call for America. Jack Smith is not above the law and must be held accountable under the Constitution,” Kise said.

Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer, Lindsay Whitehurst and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., July 13, 2024. The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case of former President Donald Trump in Florida has dismissed the prosecution because of concerns over the appointment of the prosecutor who brought the case. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Aircraft assembly workers walked off the job at at Boeing factories near Seattle and elsewhere early Friday after union members voted overwhelmingly to go on strike.

Boeing is just the latest business to grapple with union workers over issues including wages and benefits like health care.

Here's a look at some recent company negotiations with their unions.

Late last year the United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, along with a similar deal with General Motors, that would raise pay across the industry and force automakers to absorb higher costs.

The agreements, which run through April 2028, ended contentious talks that began in the summer of 2022 and led to six-week-long strikes at all three automakers.

The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW. The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains.

Top assembly plant workers were to receive immediate 11% raises and would earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028.

Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers. They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract.

UPS workers that are members of the Teamsters union approved a tentative contract with the package delivery company last year. The run up to the approval was not smooth though, with contentious labor negotiations that threatened to disrupt package deliveries for millions of businesses and households nationwide.

After negotiations broke down in early July 2023, Atlanta-based UPS reached a tentative contract agreement with the Teamsters just days before an Aug. 1 deadline.

At the time the tentative agreement was struck, full- and part-time union workers were set to get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more in total by the end of the five-year contract. Starting hourly pay for part-time employees also got bumped up to $21, but some workers said that fell short of their expectations.

UPS said at the time that by the end of the new contract, the average UPS full-time driver would make about $170,000 annually in pay and benefits. It was not clear how much of that figure benefits accounted for.

As part of the deal, the delivery company also agreed to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a full holiday, end forced overtime on drivers’ days off and stop using driver-facing cameras in cabs, among a host of other issues. It eliminated a two-tier wage system for drivers and tentative deals on safety issues were also reached, including equipping more trucks with air conditioning.

Earlier this month video game performers reached agreements with 80 individual games that have signed interim or tiered budget agreements with the performers’ union and accepted the artificial intelligence provisions they have been seeking.

The performers had been striking for over a month.

Members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists began striking in July after negotiations with game industry giants that began more than a year and a half ago came to a halt over AI protections.

The interim agreement secures wage improvements, protections around “exploitative uses” of artificial intelligence and safety precautions that account for the strain of physical performances, as well as vocal stress. The tiered budget agreement aims to make working with union talent more feasible for independent game developers or smaller-budget projects while also providing performers the protections under the interim agreement.

Last month thousands of hospitality union workers on the Las Vegas Strip reached a tentative deal with the Venetian and Palazzo resorts, a first for employees at the sprawling Italian-inspired complex that opened 25 years ago.

The Culinary Workers Union announced on the social platform X that the deal came together after a year of negotiations. It covers over 4,000 hotel and casino workers, from housekeepers and cocktail servers to bartenders and porters.

Bethany Khan, a union spokesperson, said the deal mirrors the major wins secured in recent contracts awarded to 40,000 hospitality workers at 18 Strip properties owned or operated by casino giants MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts.

Those wins included a 32% pay increase over five years, housekeeping workload reductions and improved job security amid advancements in technology and artificial intelligence.

The bump in pay under those contracts will amount to an average $35 hourly wage by the end of the contracts, according to the union. Workers at these properties were making about $26 hourly with benefits before winning their latest contracts in November.

Unions representing 85,000 health care workers reached a tentative agreement with industry giant Kaiser Permanente in October 2023 following a strike over wages and staffing levels.

The deal included setting minimum hourly wages at $25 in California, where most of Kaiser’s facilities are located, and $23 in other states. Workers would also see a 21% wage increase over four years.

The lead up to the tentative agreement included a three-day strike involving 75,000 workers in multiple states.

The tentative agreement also included protective terms around subcontracting and outsourcing, as well as initiatives to invest in the current workforce and address a staffing crisis.

Hollywood’s actors voted to ratify a deal with studios in December 2023 that ended their strike after nearly four months, bringing an official finish to a labor strife that shook the entertainment industry for most of last year.

Members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists approved a three-year contract.

Control over the use of artificial intelligence was the most hard-fought issue in the long, methodical negotiations. The contract called for a 7% general pay increase with further hikes coming in the second and third years of the deal.

The agreement also included a hard-won provision that temporarily derailed talks: the creation of a fund to pay performers for future viewings of their work on streaming services, in addition to traditional residuals paid for the showing of movies or series.

Boeing Machinists Union members Steven Wilson, left, Dave Hendrickson, center,, and Mark Erickson, right, wave to passing traffic while on the picket line at the Renton assembly plant, Friday, Sept. 13, 2024, in Renton, Wash. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)