Jack Smith urges appeals court to revive Trump’s Mar-a-Lago case after Judge Cannon’s ‘nonsensical’ ruling

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Special counsel Jack Smith is urging a federal appeals court to revive the classified documents case against Donald Trump, after a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the charges in a shock ruling that argued Smith’s office was unlawfully created. Special counsel Jack Smith is urging a federal appeals court to revive the Mar-a-Lago case against Donald Trump The former president faced 40 separate charges stemming from allegations that he withheld hundreds of classified documents after leaving the White House for his private Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, then conspired to obstruct government attempts to retrieve them. In July, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas filed a wholly separate opinion in an unrelated landmark ruling on presidential “immunity” to cast doubt on the constitutionality of the special counsel’s office, which appeared to give Trump and Judge Cannon a legal pathway to dismissing the Florida case. An undated image — released by the US District Court Southern District of Florida, and attached as evidence in the indictment against Donald Trump — shows stacks of boxes in a bathroom and shower at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club The Mar-a-Lago case marked the first federal indictment of a former president, and stemmed from law enforcement’s recovery of more than 13,000 documents — including 300 marked classified — at his Florida compound in 2022, after the National Archives and Records Administration had spent more than a year trying to get them back.