Judge Dismisses Classified Documents Case Against Trump (2024)

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Judge dismisses classified documents case against Trump.

She also found that Mr. Smith had been improperly funded by the Treasury Department.

The ruling by Judge Cannon, who was put on the bench by Mr. Trump in his final year in office, flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era that upheld the legality of the ways in which independent prosecutors have been put into their posts.

It handed Mr. Trump a major legal victory two days after he was wounded in a shooting at a campaign rally and at the very onset of the political pageant where he is set to formally become his party’s presidential nominee.

The classified documents case, which is being heard in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., once appeared to be the most straightforward of the four criminal prosecutions that Mr. Trump has faced. He was charged last year with illegally holding on to classified national security materials after leaving office and then obstructing government efforts to retrieve them along with two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos DeOliveira.

The charges against Mr. Nauta and Mr. DeOliveira were also tossed out. Mr. Smith’s office said he intended to 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,” said Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel. “The Justice Department has authorized the special counsel to appeal the court’s order.”

But even if the appeal succeeds, the case still might never go in front of a jury.

It has long been clear that the documents case would not go to trial before the election in November, largely because of the glacial pace with which Judge Cannon has handled it. Should Mr. Trump be elected president again, he could simply have his Justice Department dismiss the case if it is reinstated on appeal — and even if he does not, longstanding Justice Department policy forbids prosecuting a sitting president.

But Judge Cannon’s decision to dismiss the indictment in its entirety at such a consequential moment in Mr. Trump’s campaign was nonetheless a remarkable development for the former president’s legal and political future, giving him further ammunition to portray the prosecution as an effort by President Biden and his allies to undercut him in the election.

In a statement on his social media platform, Mr. Trump said the decision dismissed what he described as a “Lawless Indictment.”

He wrote that the decision should be followed “quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” referring to the three other criminal indictments filed against him last year, as well as civil cases he has faced.

In her 93-page order — by far the longest she has written in more than a year of handling the documents case — Judge Cannon offered an in-depth look at her legal reasons for tossing out the charges. At the heart of her thinking was an assertion that no specific federal statute authorized the appointment of special counsels like Mr. Smith or gave them the “prosecutorial power” that they have wielded for 25 years.

Special counsels are currently governed by Justice Department regulations traditionally believed to have been based on a series of federal laws laying out the structure of the department and the powers of the attorney general. That has been the practice since 1999 when Congress allowed the Independent Counsel Act, which authorized and governed a different type of independent prosecutor, to lapse in the wake of the Whitewater investigation into President Bill Clinton.

But Judge Cannon took a wrecking ball to all of that, ruling that none of the statutes governing the conduct of attorneys general actually gave them the authority to appoint special prosecutors like Mr. Smith.

Moreover, she declared that allowing special counsels to operate under the control of the attorney general was a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers. And she invited Congress to pass a new law if legislators wanted Mr. Smith to keep pursuing the case against Mr. 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,” she wrote, “there is a valid means by which to do so.”

When the Independent Counsel Act was permitted to expire and was replaced by internal Justice Department regulations, there was a consensus in Washington that special prosecutors needed to be independent enough to handle sensitive political investigations without undue influence from powerful politicians, but not so independent that they would run amok and abuse their power.

In her ruling, Judge Cannon clearly sided with those who feared that special counsels like Mr. Smith were unchecked by sufficient accountability to the attorney general.

“The special counsel regulations impose almost no supervision or direction over the special counsel and give him broad power to render final decisions on behalf of the United States,” she wrote.

In their initial motion concerning Mr. Smith’s appointment, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had asked Judge Cannon to consider the related issue of whether the special counsel’s office had been improperly funded in violation of the Constitution’s appropriations clause.

The judge appeared to agree with that argument as well, writing that Mr. Smith had been “drawing funds from the Treasury without statutory authorization” and that “there is good reason to believe that the Appropriation Clause violation serves as a separate, independent basis to dismiss.”

Her decision to dismiss the case came two weeks after Justice Clarence Thomas expressed his own doubts about how Mr. Smith got his job in a brief concurrence to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling granting Mr. Trump broad immunity against criminal prosecution.

The concurrence was unusual given that the question of Mr. Smith’s appointment was not under consideration by the court at the time and in fact was never raised in the case underlying the immunity ruling. That ruling stemmed from Mr. Trump’s other federal indictment — the one in Washington in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

Justice Thomas never mentioned Judge Cannon or the classified documents case in his concurrence. But he did recommend that “lower courts” look into the “essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment.” Last month, Judge Cannon did precisely that, holding two days of hearings in Fort Pierce on the issue of Mr. Smith’s appointment and funding.

The hearings were unusual, not the least because they covered in great detail what seemed to be settled legal ground.

Reaching back to the early 1970s, federal courts have repeatedly rejected efforts to question the legality of independent prosecutors like Mr. Smith. Those have included the Supreme Court upholding the appointment of Leon Jaworski, one of the special prosecutors who investigated the Watergate scandal, in a decision that was largely focused on the issue of President Richard M. Nixon’s claims of executive privilege.

Judges have also tossed out efforts to invalidate the work of special counsels like Robert S. Mueller III, who examined connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.

In her ruling, however, Judge Cannon said that it was a “mistaken premise” to view Mr. Smith as “just another in a long line of ‘special attorneys’ of similar ilk.” She asserted that he was different from his predecessors for having come to the job as a private citizen and because he operated with “very little oversight or supervision.”

“In the end, there does appear to be a ‘tradition’ of appointing special-attorney-like figures in moments of political scandal throughout the country’s history,” she wrote. “But very few, if any, of these figures actually resemble the position of Special Counsel Smith."

The decision to kill the classified documents case, and the hearing that preceded it, were hardly the first unorthodox moves Judge Cannon has made since she first took control of the case last June.

Over and over, she has issued rulings and taken procedural steps that have prompted second-guessing and criticism among legal scholars, many of whom have pointed out that she has been on the bench for less than four years and has limited experience in overseeing criminal trials.

She has often shown a willingness to grant a serious audience to some of Mr. Trump’s most far-fetched defense claims. And her penchant for scheduling hearings to consider questions that many federal judges would have dealt with on the merits of written filings alone has played into Mr. Trump’s strategy of seeking to delay the case for as long as possible.

Her decision about Mr. Smith’s appointment was also striking for the way in which it seemed to shut down any efforts by prosecutors to fight it outside of an appeal to a higher court.

Judge Cannon, for instance, appeared to foreclose the idea of Mr. Smith asking to file additional papers or to request that the issue be reheard. She noted that prosecutors had already been afforded a “full and fair opportunity to brief the matter.”

And she ended her ruling in a way that left no doubt about her intentions to end the prosecution.

“The Clerk is directed to CLOSE this case,” she wrote. “Any scheduled hearings are CANCELED. Any pending motions are DENIED AS MOOT, and any pending deadlines are TERMINATED.”

But she will not have the final word. Mr. Smith’s appeal will go initially to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

A three-judge panel from that court handed Judge Cannon a stern rebuke nearly two years ago, reversing a decision she made that favored Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.

What is the appointments clause of the Constitution?

Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida found that no corresponding law existed to authorize the Justice Department’s appointment of the special counsel in the documents case, Jack Smith.

She wrote that the appointment of Mr. Smith by President Biden’s attorney general “effectively usurps” a power vested in Congress.

Judge Cannon, who was elevated to the federal bench by Mr. Trump in 2020, said Mr. Smith’s appointment required either a confirmation by federal lawmakers or the enactment of a broader law giving the Justice Department the power to make such an appointment.

In issuing her ruling, the judge defied a long history of attorneys general appointing independent counsels.

The Supreme Court has consistently acted as though special prosecutors are legally appointed, said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown University. “This is a really idiosyncratic view that Cannon has,” he said.

In a 1974 Supreme Court decision upholding a subpoena from the special prosecutor in the Watergate inquiry, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote that “Congress has vested in the Attorney General the power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States Government.”

But Judge Cannon held that the decision did not support the appointment of Mr. Smith, writing that the Supreme Court had “assumed without deciding” that the attorney general had the power to appoint the Watergate case special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski.

In appointing Mr. Smith, the Justice Department had cited sections of the federal legal code that it said authorized the creation of the special counsel. But Judge Cannon found that those sections did not authorize the appointment.

Professor Chafetz said the ruling could be seen as less a constitutional opinion than a statutory one, because it hinged in part on Judge Cannon’s analysis of sections of the statutory code.

“Everybody agrees that there needs to be a statutory authority to appoint Smith,” he said. “The question is just whether there is that statutory authority.”

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the office of the special counsel, said the office planned to appeal the ruling.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue,” Mr. Carr said in a statement.

Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said he thought the decision would “most likely” be reversed, arguing in an interview that sections of the statutory code “clearly” empower the attorney general to appoint a special counsel.

But he added that the ruling would have sweeping implications “unless it is reversed.”

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

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Dismissal brings new scrutiny to judge with a history of unorthodox decisions.

Still, almost no one, including some defense lawyers working on the case, expected Judge Cannon to throw out the charges against Mr. Trump by ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job — especially on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

The ruling upended 25 years of Justice Department procedure for naming and governing special counsels and called into question decisions by previous courts reaching back to the Watergate era.

“The very definition of an activist judge, she has single-handedly upended three decades of established law historically used fairly and in a bipartisan manner,” said Joëlle Anne Moreno, a law professor at Florida International University.

From the moment that Judge Cannon was assigned to the case, there were questions about her ability to handle it. She took control of one of the most significant prosecutions in American history, rife with legal and political complexities, even though she had been a judge for less than four years and had extremely limited experience in overseeing criminal trials.

On top of all that, the main defendant was the president who had nominated her to the federal bench.

Her colleagues in the Southern District of Florida were concerned enough about her stewardship of the case that not just one, but two of them approached her early in her tenure and asked her to consider stepping back and handing off the matter to another federal judge.

One of the jurists — the chief judge of the district — suggested it would be inappropriate for Judge Cannon to continue on the case because of a ruling she had made in Mr. Trump’s favor in a related civil case after the F.B.I. had searched Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022.

In a move that drew national scrutiny and criticism, Judge Cannon intervened in the civil case and barred the Justice Department from using any of the documents that agents seized from Mar-a-Lago in their inquiry until an independent arbiter had sorted through them for any that were privileged.

That decision was quickly reversed in a stinging ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which said she never had legal authority to get involved in the first place.

Over and over, throughout her handling of the documents case in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon has made similarly unusual decisions, often showing a willingness to grant a serious audience to some of the former president’s most far-fetched defense claims.

She has also repeatedly scheduled hearings in court to debate issues that many federal judges would have dealt with on the merits of written filings alone. And that has made it all but certain that the case will not reach a jury until well after the election in November — one of Mr. Trump’s overarching legal and political objectives.

Many legal experts questioned Judge Cannon’s decision to hold a hearing last month on the issue of Mr. Smith’s appointment, arguing that several courts reaching back to the Watergate era had already upheld the legality of independent prosecutors.

The hearing was even odder, the experts pointed out, because the judge allowed outside parties who had filed friend-of-the-court briefs to address her directly for up to 30 minutes — a practice that rarely takes place at the trial level and is more common in appellate-level courts like the Supreme Court.

Entertaining direct arguments from these outside parties was a signal that she was taking Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss on the appointments question seriously, Joel S. Johnson, an associate professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, said last month before the hearing.

Judge Cannon has her defenders. She approached the question of the constitutionality of the special counsel appointment with the thorough preparation of a circuit judge, said Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who argued against the legality of the special counsel before her at the hearing last month.

“I’ve rarely seen a district court judge this well prepared,” Mr. Blackman said. “She knew the cases, she knew the statutes and I suspect she had already written most of that opinion already.”

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section, said that even though Judge Cannon’s ruling on Monday was unusual and rejected by other judges, it is also defensible in the context of recent Supreme Court decisions.

He cited the court’s decision granting Mr. Trump substantial immunity for actions he took in office and other decisions as “legal doctrine that upsets settled principles on separations of power and presidential accountability.” In a concurring opinion in the immunity decision, Justice Clarence Thomas had called for re-examining the legality of the appointment of special counsels.

But the hearing and decision on Mr. Smith’s appointment were hardly the only unusual moves by Judge Cannon.

In one of the more striking aspects of her handling of the case, Judge Cannon has ignored a common practice in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits, of trial judges passing off routine motions to the magistrate judge attached to a case.

Judge Cannon has not delegated any motions to the magistrate judge in this case, Bruce E. Reinhart. And Judge Reinhart knows the case well: He approved the search warrant used by the F.B.I. two years ago when agents descended on Mar-a-Lago and hauled away a trove of classified material that is central to the case.

This spring, in another unusual move, Judge Cannon ordered the defense and the prosecution to write dueling instructions for the jury that seemed to take for granted one of Mr. Trump’s most far-fetched defense claims: that he could not be tried for holding on to a trove of classified documents because he had designated the materials in question to be his own personal property under a law known as the Presidential Records Act.

By appearing to adopt the former president’s contentious position on the act, Judge Cannon seemed to be nudging any eventual jurors toward acquitting Mr. Trump or even leaving open the possibility that she herself could acquit the former president near the end of the proceeding by declaring that the government had failed to prove its case.

“I have never seen a case where one would contemplate giving the jury alternative instructions: ‘Decide the case on this hypothetical scenario and then answer the question in an alternative understanding of the law,’” said Margaret Kwoka, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Judge Cannon has rarely issued rulings in the documents case that have been longer than 15 or 20 pages, and has often made decisions without revealing much about her legal reasoning.

But her order on Monday dismissing the case because of Mr. Smith’s appointment was 93 pages and full of a sweeping tour of historical events reaching back through the Watergate affair to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s.

“It’s significant that this 90-plus-page decision is more erudite with more traditional citations than some of Judge Cannon’s other opinions,” said Mr. Butler, the former federal prosecutor.

Frustrations with Judge Cannon have been mounting for months among members of Mr. Smith’s team, including one of his top deputies, David Harbach, who has twice lost his temper with the judge during hearings in her courtroom.

It is likely that prosecutors will appeal this ruling in particular to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which issued the rebuke against Judge Cannon two years ago over her decision about a special master.

Alan Morrison, a professor at George Washington Law School, said the order to dismiss the case on Monday may end up having a positive outcome for Mr. Smith.

“He can now take an appeal and when he prevails, he can ask the court to reassign the case to another judge,” Mr. Morrison said.

“Of course, it was clear a long time ago that she would never allow the case to be tried before Election Day — if ever,” Mr. Morrison added. “And so this order does nothing to impact the trial date adversely, in the real world.”

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Michael Waldman, a constitutional lawyer and president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said Judge Cannon “handled this case like an eager member of Donald Trump’s defense team.” He cited her slow pace in making routine pretrial decisions and her patience for hearing “somewhat outlandish legal arguments” without ever resolving some of them. Monday’s decision, however, he said, “goes beyond what she’s done before.”

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Judge Cannon’s ruling rejects precedents from courts far above her own.

The question now is whether the appeals court will rule that she got the law wrong — again erring in Mr. Trump’s favor — and whether Mr. Smith, when he appeals the decision, will also gamble on asking for the case to be reassigned to another judge.

“This is a very aggressive move on her part,” said Akhil R. Amar, a Yale Law School professor, who said he would not be surprised if she is overturned.

“She’s already been smacked down a couple of times,” he added. “On the other hand, depending on who the panel is, they might say — judges aren’t always the most courageous people in the world — ‘Trump’s going to be president and do we want to take him on?’”

Judge Cannon’s decision upended what had appeared to be settled law, not only dismissing the documents case but also starting a legal battle that could threaten the federal election subversion case against Mr. Trump — and undermine the system for semi-independent investigations of politically powerful people.

She also objected to the Justice Department’s mechanism for funding Mr. Smith’s office. But her main complaint centered on whether he was legally appointed to start.

While Mr. Smith is a former Justice Department prosecutor, he was working for an international court in Europe when Attorney General Merrick B. Garland asked him to handle criminal inquiries into Mr. Trump as special counsel — a prosecutor appointed to supervise a particularly sensitive matter and who wields the powers of a U.S. attorney with a degree of autonomy.

Mr. Smith is also overseeing the federal election subversion indictment against Mr. Trump. When the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority this month bestowed some immunity on Mr. Trump in that case, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion, questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Smith’s appointment.

No other justice joined his opinion, but the matter is all but certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court. Still, if Mr. Trump wins in November and the issue is still pending, he could use his powers to withdraw the appeal and shut down the case.

Other special prosecutors have been appointed from outside the government, including Leon Jaworski in the Watergate scandal, Lawrence E. Walsh in the Iran-contra affair and Robert S. Mueller III in the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Courts nevertheless consistently said their appointments were lawful.

In striking down Mr. Smith’s appointment, Judge Cannon argued that the Supreme Court’s acceptance of Mr. Jaworski’s appointment was unpersuasive and should not be seen as binding. She also rejected appeals court rulings upholding the appointments of Mr. Walsh and Mr. Mueller because they relied upon the Watergate decision without fresh legal analysis.

Under the Constitution, senior officials in the executive branch who exercise significant authority are called “officers.” There are two types. “Principal” officers must be presidentially appointed and confirmed by the Senate. “Inferior” officers, still senior, but more subordinate, generally must be, too, unless Congress passes a law giving a department head the power to appoint them unilaterally.

The Justice Department has taken the position that special counsels are “inferior” officers — a view that Judge Cannon accepted for the purpose of her analysis, although she expressed some doubts, given the sweep of that position’s authority. But she rejected the argument that Congress had given attorneys general the power to appoint them.

The department cited various statutes in which lawmakers have said, among other things, that attorneys general are empowered to appoint officials “to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States,” and that they may assign any attorney they have specially appointed” under law to “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal.”

But Judge Cannon said those laws did not authorize the appointment of a special prosecutor who came from outside the government. Others, she noted, have been sitting U.S. attorneys who were Senate-confirmed presidential appointees when they were selected to oversee particularly sensitive cases.

Her decision contradicted what the Supreme Court said in a landmark ruling in 1974 in upholding a subpoena by Mr. Jaworski seeking President Richard M. Nixon’s Oval Office tapes during the Watergate scandal. While a former Justice Department official, Mr. Jaworski was in private practice when the acting attorney general, Robert H. Bork, appointed him to take over the case.

In a unanimous ruling, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, a Nixon appointee, cited those statutes in broaching Mr. Jaworski’s appointment.

Congress had vested in the attorney general both the “power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States government” and “the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties,” the chief justice wrote.

The attorney general, he added, “acting pursuant to those statutes,” had delegated prosecutorial authority to Mr. Jaworski, including the power to contest Nixon’s invocation of executive privilege over the Watergate tapes.

The Justice Department — and appeals courts in other cases — has taken that passage as binding law that settles whether Congress has empowered attorneys general to appoint special prosecutors.

But Judge Cannon insisted that the passage was so-called dicta — stray or passing remarks in a judicial opinion that were tangential to the issues at hand and so do not count as binding law. She noted that Nixon had not contested the validity of Mr. Jaworski’s appointment.

“The issue of the attorney general’s appointment authority was not raised, briefed, argued or disputed before the Nixon court,” she wrote.

Other judges have interpreted the significance of the Supreme Court’s treatment of Mr. Jaworski’s appointment differently.

In 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a challenge to the authority of Mr. Walsh, the independent counsel for the Iran-contra investigation. Mr. Walsh, a former federal judge and senior Justice Department official in the Eisenhower administration, had been a lawyer in private practice at the time of his appointment.

(Congress established the position of “independent counsel” in a 1978 law that lapsed in 1999. Since 1999, a Justice Department regulation has enabled the position of “special counsel.” Both the lapsed law and the regulation say the special prosecutor should come from outside the government, although attorneys general have sometimes sidestepped that part.)

Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel in the Iran-contra case, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, said the appeals court had “no difficulty concluding that the attorney general possessed the statutory authority to create the Office of Independent Counsel.”

He cited cases dating back to 1954 that showed that an officer may delegate his or her authority to an inferior officer, and said the statutes in which Congress had granted various powers to attorneys general implicitly authorized them to create an Office of Independent Counsel.

In rejecting Judge Ginsburg’s conclusion, Judge Cannon stressed that the appeals court had looked to the passage in the Nixon tapes case she viewed as not binding, observing that, “No analysis of the statutes was provided.”

She also noted that Judge Ginsburg, in a footnote, had said the Supreme Court “presupposed the validity of a regulation appointing the special prosecutor.”

Similarly in 2019, the D.C. Circuit rejected a challenge to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia at the time of Moscow’s covert operation to help Mr. Trump win. While Mr. Mueller was a former Justice Department official and F.B.I. director, he was retired at the time of his appointment.

The D.C. Circuit panel made clear that it considered the language in the Nixon case as binding precedent, citing the Supreme Court’s 1974 ruling as settling the matter. Judge Cannon noted that this meant the panel did not reanalyze the statutes for itself.

Still, in that case, the plaintiff had argued — as Judge Cannon did on Monday — that the Nixon case language was merely a stray remark because the issue had not been directly presented and analyzed.

But in the Mueller case, the appeals court rejected that claim as unpersuasive. The panel wrote that the attorney general’s statutory authority to delegate responsibility to Mr. Jaworski — “was necessary to the decision that a justiciable controversy existed.”

It added, “The Supreme Court’s quoted statement regarding the attorney general’s power to appoint subordinate officers is, therefore, not dictum.”

In granting Mr. Trump’s request to dismiss his indictment, Judge Cannon once again went in her own direction.

As Republicans hailed the decision, at least one Democrat called for the judge to be removed from the case.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a conservative jurist who was elevated to the federal bench by Mr. Trump in 2020, ruled that the special counsel prosecuting the documents case, Jack Smith, had been improperly appointed by the Justice Department.

In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump asserted that the decision, which rejected the reasoning of decades of federal court decisions, amounted to the dismissal of a “Lawless Indictment.”

Mr. Trump wrote that the decision should be followed “quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” referring to the three other criminal indictments filed against him last year, as well as civil cases he has faced. He cited the need to “move forward in Uniting our Nation” after the assassination attempt.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, urged President Biden to order Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to dismiss the federal cases against the former president. Mr. Biden has not publicly weighed in on the dismissal.

Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who is closely aligned with Mr. Trump, lavished praise on the judge who made the unorthodox ruling, saying in a statement that the opinion had displayed “courage and wisdom.”

“Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice tried to shred the Constitution with the appointment of their so called ‘special counsel’ Jack Smith as part of their desperate illegal lawfare campaign against President Trump,” Ms. Stefanik added.

At the same time, Democrats and liberal legal scholars excoriated the ruling.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in a statement that the decision was “breathtakingly misguided,” declaring that “Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned.”

Judge Cannon, who sits on the bench in the Southern District of Florida, had previously delayed the proceeding. Even before Monday, it was all but certain that the case would not go to trial before the election in November.

Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who served as lead counsel for his party in the first Trump impeachment trial, said in a statement that the ruling ran roughshod over precedent and “common sense.”

“Judge Cannon is no doubt well aware that the Supreme Court has upheld special counsel appointments time and time again,” Mr. Goldman said in the statement, adding that the decision was the “stuff of a banana republic, not a democracy.”

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Trump’s case put the judge, Aileen Cannon, under a spotlight.

Judge Cannon grew up in Miami with a Cuban mother and American father. She attended Duke University and the University of Michigan Law School, which is when she joined the conservative Federalist Society and went on to clerk for a conservative appeals court judge. She then worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida, most often writing appellate motions. She is married with two children.

In 2020, someone from the office of Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, asked her to apply to be a potential federal judge. And in November 2020, she became one of the youngest judges on the bench in the Southern District of Florida. Though some senators raised questions about the depth of her experience, she was confirmed in a 56-21 vote.

Before she was assigned Mr. Trump’s case, she had little experience with criminal trials. Her impartiality came into question with an early decision she made in the case, insisting that an independent mediator should review the thousands of documents the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized in 2022 from Mr. Trump’s private residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla. That review would have placed the case on hold for months. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned her decision in a swift rebuke.

Since then, questions have swirled about her qualifications to oversee such a high-profile case. In June 2023, she rejected suggestions from two other more senior judges in the district to step aside.

Judge Cannon told senators that she joined the Federalist Society in law school because she enjoyed the “diversity of legal viewpoints” discussed at the group’s meetings and events.

“I also found interesting the organization’s discussions about the constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law and the limited role of the judiciary to say what the law is — not to make the law,” she said in written answers to senators’ questions during her confirmation process.

She is one of four Republican-appointed district judges in Florida who have accepted trips paid for by the Antonin Scalia School of Law, according to financial disclosures through 2022.

Judge Cannon disclosed she attended two conferences in Pray, Montana, paid for by the school. Judges Rodney Smith, Rodolfo Ruiz and Donald Graham also attended one of those years.

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Speaking of an appeal: Prosecutors in Smith’s office have for months been amassing a dossier of what they believe are bad decisions by Judge Cannon. It’s possible —although not yet clear — that along with asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to reverse her decision dismissing the documents case, they might also ask the appellate judges to consider removing her from it altogether.

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