The judge’s dismissal of the classified records case against Donald Trump has much more to do with Project 2025-style partisan politics than it does with the Constitution.
The initial impulse on reading judge Aileen Cannon’s pseudo-scholarly 93-page dismissal of the classified documents case against Donald Trump is to list the legal errors and overreaches that demonstrate its brazenness and likelihood of being reversed. The opinion, which throws out the case on the dubious premise that special counsel Jack Smith was not properly appointed, could serve as target practice for any first-year law student who has learned about statutory construction and precedent, principles that Cannon mangles as she strains to make the case go away.
But such conventional criticism isn’t really suited to Cannon’s unconventional and embarrassing work. To analyze the case in terms of the nuances of the special counsel law or Cannon’s disregard of United States vs. Nixon is to miss what’s in front of one’s face.
It’s more useful and illuminating to think of the dismissal as the first court decision of Project 2025, in which the rule of law takes an unabashed backseat to the preeminent principle of loyalty to Trump.
Cannon has been operating according to that principle with greater or lesser subtlety since she accepted Trump’s invitation in 2022 to convert a pedestrian 4th Amendment challenge to the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate into a wholly lawless gumming up of the works.
It is an illustration of the gulf between the normal assumptions of judicial propriety and Cannon’s in-the-tank oversight of the case that it took so many, including me, so long to fully accept the only hypothesis that is consistent with her continual undermining of a cut-and-dried criminal case: that this is entirely a matter of loyalty, not law.
