Another day, another miraculous escape from serious jeopardy for Donald Trump. Like a Secret Service agent shielding their protectee from danger, Judge Aileen Cannon threw herself in front of a legal bullet heading Trump's way in the Florida classified documents case, throwing the whole thing out after slow walking the case for months
The fact that Cannon would do so is not surprising given her allegiance to the man who appointed her and her already well-documented history of erecting roadblocks for the prosecution, in what looked like a slam dunk case against the former president. What is remarkable is how she did it and what it means — not just for the former president, but for the rule of law in this country.
As the New York Times notes, Judge Cannon “ruled that the entire case should be thrown out because the appointment of the special counsel who brought the case, Jack Smith, had violated the Constitution.” To do so, she twisted or ignored precedent, misconstrued statutes and cast into the dustbin of history decades of practice.
The Washington Post calls attention to the utterly idiosyncratic and arbitrary quality of Cannon’s Monday ruling by reminding us that other courts already have “rejected arguments similar to the one that Trump’s team made in Florida about the legality of Smith’s appointment.” But whether the decision is idiosyncratic and arbitrary or not, it is clearly another step toward a kind of “presidential dictatorship” in which the president, during and after his term of office, is insulated from any form of legal accountability, other than impeachment.
That Judge Cannon took her cues from Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence in the recently decided presidential immunity case shows how the world of MAGA judging works. It depends on networks of loyalists using their judicial power to protect former president Trump and, while doing so, steamrolling America’s constitutional framework.
Before looking more closely at Cannon’s decision, let's recall a little bit of the history and practice of special counsels in the United States.
To do that, we need to recall what happened during Watergate when Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox in what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. At the time, Cox was what was then called a........