On Wednesday, special counsel Jack Smith indicated that he will be appealing the judge’s decision to dismiss the indictment against Donald Trump for his handling of confidential documents.
Just two days after US District Judge Aileen Cannon dropped the case and far ahead of the 30-day deadline the prosecutors faced for launching the appeal, the special counsel team filed a notice of appeal on Wednesday. This is the initial procedural mechanism that puts the appeal in motion.
This implies that the Atlanta-based judges of the Eleventh US Circuit Court of Appeals would be the ones to examine the shocking decision.
Prosecutors did not say in the two-page Smith team file if they would want to hasten the appeals process.
Even though Trump personally appointed half of the full-time judges to the conservative-leaning appellate court, the court’s ideological bent has not prevented some of its opinions from going against the grain.
In a pivotal case that came up earlier in the probe of Trump’s records, a panel of three judges found against Cannon. The three Republicans appointed to that panel unanimously reversed her appointment of a “special master” to examine the documents confiscated by the FBI during their raid on Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2022.
Another noteworthy decision was last year’s unanimous rejection of former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ effort to transfer his felony case for election subversion from Georgia to federal court. The conservative judge who wrote the decision was nominated by Bush Sr.