A former district attorney recently explained what could happen if Florida Judge Aileen Cannon were to dismiss the case that Special Counsel Jack Smith has brought against former President Donald Trump, Newsweek reports.
This is the case in which Smith has accused Trump of illegally mishandling classified materials when he left the White House at the end of his administration.
Trump has pled not guilty to the charges, and he claims that Smith is running election interference for President Joe Biden, considering that Trump is Biden's 2024 challenger.
To support this claim, many have pointed, among other things, to the fact that Special Counsel Robert Hur decided not to prosecute Biden over his classified documents scandal despite the fact that Hur found that Biden broke the law.
The former U.S. district attorney, who spoke about Trump's classified documents case, is Preet Bharara. He did so during a recent episode of his Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.
There, Bharara specifically talked about what Smith could do if Cannon were to dismiss the case.
Bharara said:
If she does dismiss the charges Jack Smith and his team can appeal that decision. If there's an acquittal in a case, the prosecution cannot appeal the acquittal by a jury because that would violate double jeopardy. But dismissal of charges or of any counts by a judge is appealable to the relevant circuit court and here it's the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Bharara also said that Smith's other option would be to move to have Cannon removed from the case.
Bharara said:
I think there's a decent argument in favor strategically of asking for recusal on top of asking for a dismissal to be reversed given the state of the law and given the lack of merit of those motions. It's always fraught, it's generally not done on the basis of competence but done on the basis of some perceived bias on the part of that judge given particular rulings that have been made and I think they would have a reasonable basis to make that argument.
At the time of this writing, Cannon has chosen not to dismiss Smith's case.
The most recent thing to happen in the case is that Cannon granted Trump's request for the case to be delayed.
Newsweek separately reported, "Cannon granted Trump a 10-day extension after hearing that he and his lawyers are preparing for Trump's Stormy Daniels hush money trial in New York, which begins later this month."
Smith and his team were clearly not happy with this ruling.
It is unclear how this case is going to play out from here. But, there is no doubt about the fact that Cannon is under significant scrutiny from the political left.
