Devlin Barrett

attorney into that job, that would sort of negate the whole purpose of having a rule about this to begin with.

So what the judge said was this.

It would mean the government could send any private citizen off the street into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the attorney general gives her approval after the fact.

That cannot be the law, the judge wrote.

And what she means by that is if you were to allow this system to continue to the obvious conclusion, you really wouldn't have any more Senate-confirmed U.S.

attorneys.

It would just be the president picks whoever they want, whenever they want, and they just keep doing that.

Right.

And as part of the legal basis for making this decision—

She cites explicitly a decision ended up last year by a different judge in a different courtroom named Aileen Cannon, who dismissed the Trump charges for mishandling classified information because that judge found that the prosecutor in that case, a guy named Jack Smith,

was improperly appointed.

And it's an amazing bit of courtroom karma that that legal argument has now been used to dismiss an indictment that the president demanded.

Exactly.

And I'll say, having attended the hearing that led to this decision, she brought up that Cannon ruling on Jack Smith in the hearing itself.

She flagged it as, well, don't I have to follow the example set by Judge Cannon in US v. Trump?

And clearly the Trump administration did not have a good answer to that question.

I think that issue is just sort of in a coma unless and until this case is revived without a higher court deciding, no, this indictment should exist again.

I don't think you can have arguments or have a ruling about the vindictive prosecution question.

Well, they certainly could because the judge dismissed both of them with what's called without prejudice.

There are two ways to dismiss a case.