From “breathtakingly misguided” to “unthinkable”, and “her audition for a seat on the US supreme court”, judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling to dismiss Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Monday drew a range of outrage and surprise from Democrats and law experts.
Republicans, by contrast, were almost delirious with joy, celebrating what they saw as the end of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s “illegal” pursuit of the former US president, and an opportunity for Trump himself to continue to roll out his new message of “unity” that followed Saturday’s assassination attempt.
Among the loudest voices of Democratic protest was Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who called in a statement for the dismissal of Cannon, a Trump appointee to the federal bench in Florida.
“This breathtakingly misguided ruling flies in the face of long-accepted practice and repetitive judicial precedence,” he said.
“It is wrong on the law and must be appealed immediately. This is further evidence that Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned.”
Several legal experts said they also expected Smith to immediately appeal the decision to the 11th circuit court of appeal, which has reversed previous rulings by Cannon in the case, including rebuking her in 2022 for appointing a special master to review the documents.
“Judge Cannon did the unthinkable. Her decision is unprecedented and extreme, and very likely to be reversed on appeal,” said Laurence Tribe, Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, and a Guardian columnist.
“The 11th circuit has previously reversed her unanimously. When it gets to the supreme court, only Justice [Clarence] Thomas appears to have taken the view that the appointment of special counsels violates the appointments clause and the appropriations clause, so I very much doubt that even this court would agree with her.”
Tribe said he expected any Smith appeal to include a request for Cannon to be removed from the case, but added she might already be looking at a different appointment.
“Her position, among other things, the fact that she took so long to decide this issue even though it was before her four months, indicates that it’s calculated simply to serve as a kind of dress rehearsal, or job application when Justice [Samuel] Alito or Justice Thomas decided to retire from the supreme court,” he said.
“She clearly is auditioning to be the first appointment of a new Trump administration. It doesn’t speak well for her as a neutral jurist, but the ruling doesn’t exactly surprise me because she has slow-walked this case to death from the start.”
Trump, meanwhile, fired off a celebratory campaign message, hours before his appearance Monday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“I won! Case dismissed! Now it’s time for us to unite the country,” he wrote.
The conciliatory tone did not last long, however. A subsequent post on his Truth Social site, calling for the dismissal of the remaining cases against him, repeated previous debunked claims that the prosecutions represented “an election interference conspiracy” directed by Joe Biden, and that Democrats had “weaponized” the justice department in a series of “witch hunts, scams, fake claims and hoaxes” against him.
In Milwaukee, convention-goers who spoke with the Guardian were unanimously welcoming of Cannon’s ruling.
“Probably never should have been a case to begin with. Like all the other cases against President Trump, they’ve fallen apart over time,” said Rick Williams, an alternate delegate from Tennessee, ignoring the former president’s May conviction on 34 felony charges for falsifying business records.
Joe Sell, an alternate delegate from Illinois, doubted the ruling will affect the election campaign because he said people had already made up their minds about Trump. Sell falsely claimed the documents case was “phoney”.
“They staged it. They put pictures of documents and said Trump had done all this stuff when it was actually the authorities that had done that,” he said. There is no evidence to support his assertion, and Trump did not deny taking the documents from the White House.
Trump’s Republican party allies also offered full-throated endorsement.
Speaker Mike Johnson, in a tweet, called it “good news for America and for the rule of law”.
“House Republicans repeatedly argued that … Smith abused his office’s authority in pursuit of President Trump, and now a federal judge has ruled Smith never possessed the authority in the first place,” he wrote.
“As we work to unify this country following the failed assassination attempt of President Trump, we must also work to end the lawfare and political witch hunts that have unfairly targeted President Trump and destroyed the American people’s faith in our system of justice.”
Ron Johnson, Wisconsin senator, said in a tweet: “It’s good to see some sanity returned to our judicial system”; and Marjorie Taylor Greene, extremist congresswoman from Georgia, said the “weaponized” justice department was dealt “a major blow”.
“The Democrats won’t stop. They are going to keep going after every single one of us who opposes their agenda,” she said.
Adam Schiff of California, a Democratic member of the House judiciary, also alleged political interference, but from an opposite perspective.
“Today’s precedent-shattering decision in Florida is further proof that the guardrails of our democracy are coming down,” he said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Again, a partisan judge throws out decades of precedent to reach a desired political outcome.”
Other legal experts who have followed the case say they are also unsurprised by Cannon’s ruling, and expect it to be subject of an immediate appeal by Smith.
“Maybe today,” said Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond. “She is wrong, and may well be reversed on appeal. The bottom line would be that this is just going to create more delay, so will make it impossible to ever have a trial before the election.
“This is also in striking contrast to how long it’s taken her to rule on almost everything else. It is possible Smith will skip over the 11th circuit and go directly to the Supreme Court for a ruling because of the critical importance of the matter.
“As for a reassignment [of Cannon], there’s plenty of precedent that could lead to it, but we’re not there yet. First, higher courts will have to reverse her ruling and then entertain his request for a different judge. I don’t see how all that would happen before the election in November.”
