The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Jack Smith as special counsel in charge of two Justice Department investigations involving former President Donald Trump, he said in a statement Friday. You can read the appointment order here.

The announcement is a significant development that underscores the seriousness of the probes into Trump — one into his attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, the other into his handling of classified documents.

Allow me to summarize a federal appeals court decision gutting a series of pro-Trump orders with a single scene from the 1995 failson comedy Billy Madison: As the appeals court decision makes clear, everyone who read Judge Aileen Cannon’s decisions benefiting Trump is now less intelligent for having done so.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit’s decision in Trump v. United States utterly savages former President Donald Trump’s efforts to slow down a criminal investigation into classified documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence. It is equally dismissive of Cannon, the Trump-appointed federal district judge in Florida who ordered the Justice Department to halt this criminal investigation, at least temporarily.

Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge recently known for twisting the law in knots in ways that undermine one of the Justice Department’s criminal investigations into former president Donald Trump, has issued a new order that, well, twists the law into knots.

Last month, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence, and seized several boxes of documents. They include 103 documents with classified markings, some of them indicating that the information contained in those papers is classified at the highest levels. According to the Washington Post, among these papers was “a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.”

Judge Aileen Cannon’s order suspending one of the Justice Department’s criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump, at least until a court-appointed official can review documents the FBI seized from Trump, is a trainwreck of judicial reasoning. Cannon mangles the law so completely that it’s hard to know where to even begin in criticizing her opinion in Trump v. United States.

For starters, Cannon, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump days after he lost the 2020 election, argues fairly explicitly that Trump is entitled to special rules that apply to virtually no other criminal defendant, because he used to be a powerful person.

The photograph of highly classified documents on the floor at Mar-a-Lago beside a box of framed Time magazines had already gone viral Wednesday morning as perhaps the defining image of the ongoing investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information.

The image was attached to a 36-page filing from the Department of Justice in the ongoing court battle by Trump to have a special master review the documents seized by federal agents when they searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private Florida club and residence, in August. And it’s by no means the most damning claim from the overnight court filing, which you can read below.

After a week punctuated with reprimands of the Department of Justice by Republican lawmakers and their subsequent demands for accountability following an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the search warrant released Friday indicates the search was conducted in connection with, among other things, the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act is actually a series of statutes under 18 US Code Chapter 37 related to the collection, retention, or dissemination of national defense or classified information. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant referred to Section 793 — “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” which doesn’t just cover “spying” in the sense that many think of when they hear the term. Section 793 specifically states that people legally granted access to national defense documents — people like the former president — are subject to punishment should they improperly retain that information.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” were among the things FBI agents were looking for when they searched Mar-a-Lago this week. And there were numerous examples of “secret,” “confidential,” and “top secret” documents listed on the official property receipt from the seizure that was released Friday.

A warrant released alongside the receipt suggested the FBI may be looking into violations of the Espionage Act and potential obstruction of justice as well.

Two key documents related to the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Monday are now available to the public: the warrant that authorized the raid, and the property receipt that details what federal agents recovered.

Together, the documents provide a clearer picture of how the search came together, and both the size and scope of the seizure.

After news of the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home broke on Monday night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded by openly threatening Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” he said in a statement. “Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”