Trump takes boxes of materials seized from home in classified documents raid back to Mar-a-Lago: ‘Justice finally won out’

Donald Trump said Friday that boxes of classified documents that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago home during an investigation into possible misconduct have been returned to him. 

Federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case against the president in a bombshell ruling last July, less than 48 hours after Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania.

Boxes were seen being loaded on to Air Force One as Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago in Florida after his blowup with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

He wrote on Truth Social Friday: ‘The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes that Deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about.’ 

Trump added that he would one day display them in his eventual presidential library.

‘Justice finally won out. I did absolutely nothing wrong. This was merely an attack on a political opponent that, obviously, did not work well. Justice in our Country will now be restored,’ he wrote. 

Trump was accused of taking highly sensitive national security documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he left the White House, and FBI agents seized a trove of material during a search of his Florida home in August 2022.

Judge Cannon threw the case out based on ‘violations’ of the Constitution’s Appointments and Appropriations clauses.

Donald Trump said Friday that boxes of classified documents that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago home during an investigation into possible misconduct have been returned to him

Boxes were seen being loaded on to Air Force One as Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago in Florida after his blowup with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky

In her ruling, she found that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.

The decision has an enormous impact on Trump’s legal battles, and he now faces just two criminal trials in Georgia and the federal court in Washington D.C. 

A year ago, Trump’s classified documents case appeared to be his most serious legal threat: perhaps easier to prove than Trump’s January 6 case, which relied on public statements, tweets and complex schemes involving electors around the country to charge a complex conspiracy to overturn the election.

The documents case, by contrast, followed a series of prosecutions of high level officials relying mostly on the discovery of materials in their possession. 

‘Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the motion, the Court is convinced that Special Counsel Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme – the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorising expenditures by law,’ Judge Cannon wrote.

Cannon’s ruling stunned legal observers, although she had revealed skepticism of the government’s position during a hearing on Trump’s claim that the special counsel’s appointment was unfounded. 

The ruling by the Trump-appointed judge comes amid complaints among the president’s critics in legal circles that she took a long time making a series of procedural decisions that had the effect of stalling the case until the after the elections.

One of her decisions before she dismissed the case was to suspend a May trial date she had set months earlier amid disputes over evidence of classified national security documents.

This undated image, released by the US District Court Southern District of Florida, attached as evidence in the indictment against former US president Donald Trump shows stacks of boxes in a bathroom and shower allegedly in the Lake Room at Mar-a-Lago

Trump added that he would one day display the boxes in his eventual presidential library

In her 93-page ruling, Cannon ruled that the appointment of officers such as a special counsel reside in Congress, not the executive.

Attorney General Merrick Garland designated the special counsel in a move intended to provide isolation from charges of political interference had his office prosecuted the case directly. But Cannon was unpersuaded that authority existed, although special counsels have been used in a variety of high profile probes over the years. 

‘The Framers gave Congress a pivotal role in the appointment of principal and inferior officers. That role cannot be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere – whether in this case or in another case, whether in times of heightened national need or not. 

‘In the case of inferior officers, that means that Congress is empowered to decide if it wishes to vest appointment power in a Head of Department, and indeed, Congress has proven itself quite capable of doing so in many other statutory contexts,’ she wrote.

The prosecution was still moving through the legal system when Trump returned to power on January 20. 

Nine days later, Smith dropped the case, citing a Justice Department policy of not indicting or prosecuting a sitting president, months after Cannon had dismissed it. He also resigned from the department.