Nakedly Corrupt

Judge Eileen Cannon took the clue supplied by Clarence Thomas in the Trump immunity case, and has used Thomas' nonsensical and self-serving assertion that a special prosecutor needs Senate approval and used it as an excuse to dismiss the document handling case against Donald Trump.

One hopes that Jack Smith appeals, and gets her thrown off the case.

In a just world, she would be thrown off the court:

A judge on Monday dismissed the federal indictment against former president Donald Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents — his second seismic legal victory in less than a month, after a historic Supreme Court decision on immunity.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s 93-page ruling that special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed is a triumph for Trump, even if it is eventually reversed. Smith’s office vowed to appeal the ruling, saying the judge’s legal reasoning was at odds with past decisions on the issue.

………

By dismissing the entire indictment, Cannon’s decision also means that the charges are dropped for Trump’s two co-defendants, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. The Justice Department’s appeal of the issue might eventually reach the Supreme Court.

“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 Smith. “The Justice Department has authorized the Special Counsel to appeal the court’s order.”

………

Trump advisers have long considered the classified documents case to be the strongest of the four criminal cases against him — in part because the acts in question occurred mostly after he left the White House — and it was the case that most worried them. The case has been particularly concerning to those advisers because if it went to trial, it would feature first-person accounts from people in Trump’s inner orbit describing conversations with him.

The former president was charged with 40 counts of illegally retaining classified defense information and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the material. Some of the documents found in an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, contained information about top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them, The Washington Post reported last year.

Cannon’s opinion delves into the legal minutiae of special counsel regulations and does not address the crimes Trump and his co-defendants are accused of committing, or the merits of the evidence that prosecutors have collected. 

No, it doesn't.  It overturns over a hundred years of precedent and a number of laws passed because Clarence Thomas issued a concurrence, one that has no legal force, explicitly giving her a detailed set of instructions on how to throw a spanner into the works.

………

But the legal argument gained momentum this month, after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the presidential immunity case that the special counsel’s office needs to be established by Congress and that Smith needed to be confirmed by the Senate. Thomas urged lower courts to explore the issue. The justice wrote that he tacked on his concurring opinion to the immunity ruling to “highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.”

In Monday’s ruling, Cannon cited Thomas’s opinion — which none of the other justices signed on to — multiple times.

This is how you engage in a conspiracy to obstruct justice without the conspirators saying a word to each other.

Jack Smith should have been trying to get her removed from the case since day 1.  That's on him.

Thomas and Clarence though?  They should be investigated for obstruction of justice.

The complete lack of shame and blatant corruption exhibited by these two judges is more appalling and a disgrace.