HomeCrimeCannon considers brief from anti-Trump legal experts

Cannon considers brief from anti-Trump legal experts

Left: Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to the media about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Aug. 1, 2023, at an office of the Department of Justice in Washington. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)/Right: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks Tuesday April 2, 2024, at a rally in Green Bay, Wis. (AP Photo/Mike Roemer)

Left: Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to the media about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Aug. 1, 2023, at an office of the Department of Justice in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File). Right: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks Tuesday April 2, 2024, at a rally in Green Bay, Wis. (AP Photo/Mike Roemer)

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — the federal judge whose rulings in the Mar-a-Lago documents case against Donald Trump have raised eyebrows for appearing to favor the man who appointed her in late 2020 — allowed a motion to be filed in her court that positively pummeled the ex-president.

“Demonstrably incorrect” is just one way a group of constitutional lawyers and elected and federal officials — including a slew of former U.S. attorneys general — described Donald Trump‘s interpretation of the law as the former president pushes to have his Espionage Act indictment in Florida dismissed on grounds that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed.

Nineteen experts signed onto the brief including former federal prosecutors like Donald Ayer, who served under George H.W Bush and Ronald Reagan; Stuart Gerson, a former acting attorney general; and Philip Allen Lacovara, former counsel to the special prosecutor during Watergate and drafter of the brief for the government in U.S. v. Nixon. Other government officials like former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman and former U.S. Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera signed on as well as former U.S. Representative for Missouri and onetime Assistant Attorney General Tom Coleman. The full list of signatories along with the brief is available here.

In February, Trump’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the indictment due to what they argued was Smith’s “unlawful appointment and funding.” Smith was appointed as special counsel in November 2022 but should not have been, according to Trump, because the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and Appropriations Clause forbade the assignment of a “private citizen and like-minded political ally to wield the prosecutorial power of the United States.” Special counsel, Trump also contends, can only be approved with confirmation by the Senate.

As Law&Crime previously reported, that argument — which itself was supported by a pro-Trump amicus brief — was laid out by former Attorney General and co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society Edwin Meese III over a month ago and Smith had responded to it in kind in February.

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