United States Special Counsel Jack Smith has appealed a judge’s decision to throw out a criminal case that accuses former President Donald Trump of mishandling secret government documents.
Smith filed the appeal on Wednesday with the Atlanta-based 11th US Court of Appeals, just days after US District Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the case in a major victory for the ex-president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
Cannon ruled on Monday that Smith’s 2022 appointment violated the US Constitution because Congress did not authorise Attorney General Merrick Garland to name a special counsel with the degree of power and independence wielded by Smith.
Trump, who appointed Cannon to the bench in 2020, immediately welcomed the decision and called for other indictments against him to also be dismissed.
“This dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” he wrote on his Truth social platform.
The former Republican president faces three other criminal cases, two of which relate to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost to his Democratic Party rival, President Joe Biden.
Trump is expected to face off against Biden once again in November’s US elections.
Commenting on Wednesday’s appeal, a spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 campaign reiterated the ex-president’s previous call to dismiss all the cases against him.
Reporting earlier this week from the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said Cannon’s ruling ran contrary to decades of decisions by US courts.
Culhane explained that since the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, US judges and courts have repeatedly said that special prosecutors can be named by the US Department of Justice.
“This [ruling by Cannon] goes against decades of legal precedent,” Culhane said.
The decision followed another legal win for Trump after the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.
Cannon’s ruling dismissed the charges against Trump and co-defendants Walt Nauta, a personal aide to the former president, and Carlos De Oliveira, a property manager at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida where the documents were found during an FBI search in 2022.
Trump was accused of illegally retaining sensitive national security documents, including records related to the US nuclear programme and potential military vulnerabilities, at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office in January 2021.
He and his two co-defendants also were accused of obstructing an investigation into Trump’s handling of the material. All three had pleaded not guilty.
