Federal Judge Aileen Cannon will also hear arguments from outside groups on whether Jack Smith should be allowed to prosecute Trump.
Special counsel Jack Smith and attorneys for will be back in a Florida federal courtroom Friday to kick off three days of hearings to grapple with, among other issues, whether Smith should even be allowed to prosecute Trump.
The former president challenged the appointment and funding of the special counsel and argued in filings in February that Smith “lacks the authority to prosecute this action.” Trump’s legal team employed a legal theory that has been rejected by courts in attempts other independent Justice Department probes. Trump’s attorneys say Attorney General Merrick Garland lacked the constitutional authority to appoint Smith, arguing that a special counsel must be appointed by the president and approved by the Senate.
has taken the unusual step of inviting outside groups to argue each side of the issue before the court. Former federal prosecutors and elected officials filed a brief in support of Smith’s appointment and urged her to rule swiftly against Trump to avoid what they said would be unnecessary hearings on the matter. The group includes former Justice Department officials who served under Republican presidential administrations and a former Republican member of Congress.
On the other side, former U.S. Attorneys General Edwin Meese and Michael Mukasey, who each served as attorney general in Republican administrations, wrote to bolster Trump’s challenge. They said that “nearly all” special prosecutors in recent history were previously appointed by the sitting president and approved by the Senate as U.S. attorneys. Smith was “neither”, they wrote, a contention the group will make in court on Friday.
Trump’s team also challenged the funds the Justice Department uses to pay for the special counsel probes – an indefinite bucket of federal funds that special counsels are allocated by Congress to do their work.
