As the Republican National Convention opened on Monday, Donald Trump scored a major legal victory when a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida dismissed the criminal case against the former president for illegally keeping classified national security documents after his presidency ended. Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Attorney General Merrick Garland had no power to appoint Jack Smith as a special counsel. Her ruling stunned many legal experts, and the Justice Department plans to appeal. This comes after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court recently granted Trump, and presidents more generally, almost complete immunity from prosecution for “official” actions taken in office. “This was an opinion in search of a result,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades. “This is just deeply offensive, and I suspect it will be overturned, but the real result is there is no prospect that Donald Trump will be tried before the November elections.”
