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.
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