Judge dismisses Trump classified documents case — days after escaping assassination attempt

A Florida judge has dismissed the case against former US President Donald Trump, alleging mishandling of classified documents and willful retention of national defense information.

The verdict, considered a huge victory for the former president, comes just days after Trump survived an assassination attempt.

According to Jack Smith, the US justice department special counsel, who led the investigation, the former president not only possessed classified documents belonging to the government and other foreign countries, but he also showed them to other people.

Smith said the classified documents Trump stored in boxes at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities, US nuclear programmes, potential vulnerabilities of the US and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

An indictment said Trump showed civilians, including a writer, the documents and obstructed efforts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to get them back.

Defense lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including one faulting Smith’s appointment as special counsel.

The lawyers said Smith had been illegally appointed under the constitution’s appointments clause, which governs the appointment of certain government positions, adding that his office was improperly funded by the US justice department.

Aileen Cannon, the US district judge, granted the motion.

“The Court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme—the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law,” Cannon said in her 93-page order.

The verdict puts a sudden end to a criminal prosecution that was considered by many to be the most incriminating of all the legal threats the former president faced at the time it was filed.