Aileen M. Cannon, United States District Judge, Southern District of Florida, Image via Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons

An excerpt from a forthcoming book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis talks about how special counsel Jack Smith's gamble of trying President Donald Trump's classified documents case in Florida backfired.

In the book, titled “Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department,” the authors say that Federal prosecutor "David Raskin was expecting that the criminal case he had helped build against former president Donald Trump would be filed in Washington, D.C."

Smith instead decided to bring the case to trial in Florida, causing Raskin to ask, “Are you all f—— insane?” in a hallway at a Justice Department building in D.C. in 2023.

Raskin noted that this move would be a "huge gamble," because "the case could wind up before U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump-appointed jurist who had already temporarily blocked federal agents from reviewing sensitive records seized from Trump’s club during the investigation."

Smith, the authors note, thought trying the case in Florida would "put them on firmer legal ground, reducing the risk of the most serious charges being overturned on appeal," and the chances of Cannon getting the case were calculated at 1 in 6.

“I’m not worried about Florida,” Smith said later when presenting his decision to Justice Department officials.

"But the early calculation of the odds that Cannon would get the case — and Smith’s faith that the evidence could win her over even after she did — turned out to be wrong," the authors say.

The authors' behind-the-scenes account include interviews with senior officials in the Trump and Biden administrations, government prosecutors and federal agents, as well as outside advisers "who were firsthand witnesses to one of the most challenging periods in Justice Department history," they write.

While Raskin "and others" believed charging Trump in D.C. was a "surer path to conviction," Smith did not, and, say Leonnig and Davis, "the fallout is still on display."

Smith, they write, "had a reputation for decisiveness and fairness, having pulled the plug on investigations into lawmakers from both parties for lack of evidence during his time at the Justice Department."

When Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland contacted Smith to gauge his interest in overseeing the Trump investigations, Smith, a triathelete who had just been bedridden in his Netherlands home from a bad accident, told Garland he'd accept the job if asked, they write.

"Following the operation, Smith had been prescribed powerful painkillers, and they worried the sedatives could compromise Smith’s ability to legally take the oath of office. Smith decided to leave no doubt about his mental state: He discharged himself from the hospital against doctor’s orders. At home, he went cold turkey, taking no prescription drugs before Garland announced his appointment on Nov. 18," they write.

Smith, to save time, "relied on more than a dozen prosecutors and FBI agents already working on the two cases from inside the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C." instead of assembling a new team.

His team included "attorneys Smith knew and trusted from his time leading the Justice Department’s vaunted Public Integrity Section, set up after Watergate with a broad mandate to investigate public corruption," they write.

"Smith told his staff they could not leave the public wondering about unsettled allegations of wrongdoing, nor could they leave Trump in limbo. In the interest of justice, Smith told people he had to file charges or clear Trump of wrongdoing in both cases before the election," they say.

Smith worked tirelessly on the case, they write, often going "from morning till night holding meetings around the small conference table in his stark office. Increasingly, he conferred privately with his trusted inner circle."

His "siloed management style ruffled feathers," the authors note, but it made no difference.

"To those often seated inside the boss’s corner office and to those who had known him for decades, Smith had nothing to apologize for. He alone would ultimately have to answer for his decisions, so he wasn’t going to make them by committee," they write.

Smith asked James I. Pearce, a senior Justice Department appellate attorney who had spent a decade as a federal prosecutor, including in the Public Integrity Section, to analyze whether charges should be filed in D.C., where the records were removed from the White House, or in Florida, where investigators believed Trump had conspired to conceal them, the authors explain.

Pearce convicted Smith Florida was the way to go. "The case law generally favored the prosecutors bringing the charges in Florida, where the conduct at the heart of the case had occurred," they write.

Raskin disagreed and said, "Given what the prosecution team saw as her track record of disregarding precedent, Cannon getting the case was too enormous a risk to ignore."

“This is an existential threat to the case,” Raskin said.

But, the authors note, in Smith's meticulous pros and cons list of Florida versus D.C., Smith said that "in Florida they had extensive evidence of the steps Trump had taken to conceal the records after leaving office. For instance, evidence indicated that Trump had instructed his valet to move boxes from a room at Mar-a-Lago before his attorney arrived to review documents that should be returned to the government. That caused Trump’s attorneys to unwittingly provide false information to investigators that no sensitive government documents remained."

"Smith’s team feared that any convictions they won in D.C. might be appealed on the grounds that the alleged crimes occurred in Florida," the authors write.

David Newman, a senior adviser in the division, warned Smith and his lieutenants of the danger Florida.

“The biggest risk you have is Cannon gets the case,” he said in a meeting with Smith and his deputies. “Then it’s dead.”

AG Garland also wanted to know "more about the decision to seek an indictment in Florida. Smith and his team explained their analysis," the authors say. "Garland asked his staff to stress-test Smith’s legal reasoning for bringing the case in Florida and, specifically, whether the charges could be doomed, or seriously endangered, in D.C."

Garland was convinced.

To "Smith and Garland, the odds didn’t matter. Both were convinced the legal analysis showed the best case was in Florida. They would simply have to face that possibility," the authors write.

And that's exactly what happened. "Some gasped seeing the initials at the top of the docket: 'AMC,' for Aileen Mercedes Cannon," the authors write.

Jay Bratt, a top national security prosecutor helping to lead the case, told Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, who had overseen the documents probe before Smith’s appointment, "You’re not going to believe it."

“We got Cannon," Bratt said.

“We’re screwed,” Olsen said. "This is really not good," Bratt said to Smith, who replied, "We'll see. We'll see."

On July 15, 2024, Cannon ruled that Smith had not been lawfully appointed and confirmed by Congress as a special counsel, a decision that cut against decades of previous special counsel appointments, citing that reasoning to dismiss the entire classified documents case.

"The collapse of the classified documents case was tantamount to vindication in the eyes of many Trump supporters. It also emboldened Trump in his drive for revenge and fueled his desire to remake the Justice Department," the authors note.