Gambiaj.com – (FLORIDA, United States) – Federal prosecutors in Florida moved to dismiss the appeal in the Mar-a-Lago prosecution, pushing to bring an end to the Trump classified documents case. The motion, which comes after the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the state assigned a new prosecutor to the case, still needs to be approved by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
But doing so signals an end to an appeal ignited by former special counsel Jack Smith, as he fought a lower court ruling from Judge Aileen Cannon finding he was unlawfully appointed.
The move is more broadly set to unwind charges against President Trump’s two co-defendants in the case, who the Biden administration still wished to prosecute if Cannon’s order was reversed.
The motion noted that valet Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos de Oliveira, who were accused of aiding Trump in concealing boxes of documents from prosecutors and his own attorney, did not oppose the move.
By moving to dismiss the appeal with prejudice, prosecutors would be barred from relaunching any similar efforts in the future.
Cannon last year dismissed the case, siding with arguments from Trump that Smith was unlawfully appointed and could therefore not bring charges.
It was a decision that undercut 50 years of precedent on rulings regarding special counsel authority.
The case had also been the subject of another ongoing legal battle: whether Smith could release the volume of his report dealing with Trump’s efforts to conceal classified documents.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland agreed with Smith that the Mar-a-Lago report should be withheld from the public given the ongoing cases against Nauta and de Oliviera.
But their efforts to allow it to be reviewed by the four leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees were blocked by Cannon, who indicated it would be a revealing report.
“Volume II includes detailed and voluminous discovery information,” she wrote in a decision the day after Trump was sworn in, referring to the Mar-a-Lago volume.
“Much of this information has not been made public in Court filings. It includes myriad references to bates-stamped information provided by the Special Counsel in discovery and subject to the protective order, including interview transcripts, search warrant materials, business records, toll records, video footage, various other records obtained pursuant to grand jury subpoena, information as to which President-Elect Trump has asserted the attorney-client privilege in motions in this proceeding evidence, and other non-public information.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) made an eleventh hour bid to ask Garland to drop the charges against the two co-defendants in order to allow for the report’s release.
Charges against Trump were dropped at Smith’s request after his election, but the case nonetheless laid out a plot to retain some 300 records with classified markings after leaving office, spurring Espionage Act charges against the president.
