Judge Aileen Cannon's decision to dismiss Donald Trump's criminal case in Florida could have a far-reaching impact on many other criminal cases, according to a report published Monday.
The federal judge ruled last month that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed because he was not confirmed by the Senate, and as a result she tossed out Trump's indictment in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Legal experts say Cannon's decision could now be used to challenge prosecutions by any interim official who's not confirmed by Congress, reported the Washington Post.
“The decision creates risk elsewhere,” said Matthew Seligman, a lawyer at Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center who argued before Cannon as an outside legal expert that Smith's appointment was constitutional.
Cannon's ruling rejects decades of precedent by other courts that upheld the appointments of special counsels or similar prosecutors, and while one sentence in her ruling suggests her decision would not apply to acting officials, several legal experts said it could be years before the consequences of her opinion are fully understood.
“There seems to be willingness of right-wing judges to say that everything that came before is of no consequence when it comes to determining history and constitutional power,” said Philip Allen Lacovara, deputy solicitor general during the Nixon administration who later served on the Watergate special prosecutor team.
“That means they feel free to overturn anything that has been viewed as acceptable and legitimate based upon a novel and recent view of constitutional allocation of power.”
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Several legal experts expressed concern that a defendant could cite Cannon's opinion to argue that an interim official had no authority to bring an action against them, just as Cannon cited a nonbinding concurring opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to support her own reasoning in the special counsel ruling.
Thomas questioned the constitutionality of Smith's appointment in his concurring opinion in the presidential immunity ruling involving Trump's election interference case in Washington, D.C., but legal experts questioned whether the Supreme Court would apply Cannon's reasoning in other cases.
“I don’t think there are five complete rogue actors on the Supreme Court,” said Vikram Amar, a professor at the University of California at Davis School of Law. “It might stimulate other people to make unconvincing arguments in other cases. Will those arguments prevent the work of the Justice Department in the long run? I don’t expect so.”
