U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's July 15, 2024 dismissal order can be found here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648652/gov.uscourts.flsd.648652.672.0_2.pdf
"The Department of Justice (DOJ) authorized [Jack] Smith to appeal the decision to the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals...." - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/jack-smith-responds-after-aileen-cannon-ruling/ar-BB1q2iUg
I decided to close the question in nine months because this seems like plenty of time for a high-profile case like this.
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Apologies for the delayed resolution.
For those who are interested, in my unscientific, one-off testing, here is how various LLMs did at surfacing the key information -- with my custom prompts which (more or less) make it very clear that rational thinking and evidence are essential:
- Gemini 2.5 Pro was incredibly wrong in so many ways. It got the answer wrong and it failed to retrieve and process a useful set of reference material. Worse, it even denied that Cannon had dismissed the case in July 2024! To add insult to injury, even after repeated corrections, it failed miserably to produce valid references: the titles and URLs were flat out hallucinated. This was truly a miserable showing, which surprised me because I've otherwise found Gemini to be a top performer.
- Claude Opus 4.1 with Extended Thinking was correct in its final assessment, but it didn't arrive at that by fully correct reasoning and consideration of the case history: "Cannon's July 2024 dismissal was NOT overturned within 9 months. On January 29, 2025, DOJ voluntarily dismissed its appeal with prejudice, ending the case without any 11th Circuit ruling on the merits. The prediction market resolves NO." This reasoning is faulty; the case was not completely dropped on January 29, 2025!
- ChatGPT 5 demonstrated an impressive comprehensive understanding and a clear summary:
> - "The government did appeal Cannon’s July 15, 2024 dismissal (notice of appeal filed July 17, 2024).
> - But the Eleventh Circuit never issued a merits opinion reversing Cannon’s dismissal. Instead, the government voluntarily moved to dismiss its appeal in stages (first as to Trump in late November 2024; later as to the co-defendants in early February 2025), and the Eleventh Circuit granted those motions. Those actions left Cannon’s dismissal intact rather than overturned on appeal.
Note: I am not endorsing OpenAI nor ChatGPT 5 generally, but the results for this prompt were starkly in its favor.
According to https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-court-drops-documents-case-against-trump-associates-final-step-legal-saga-2025-02-11/
> WASHINGTON, Feb 11 (Reuters) - A U.S. court on Tuesday granted prosecutors' request to drop the criminal case against two associates of President Donald Trump who were accused of obstructing a probe into his mishandling of classified documents, marking the end of the federal cases brought against Trump while he was out of office.
>
> The U.S. Court of the Appeals for the 11th Circuit approved dropping the case against Trump valet Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who were charged alongside Trump in a case accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home and social club. All three pleaded not guilty.
>
> A lawyer for Nauta, Richard Klugh, said the decision "closes out a prosecution that was misguided and which should never have been filed."
>
> The charges were brought by former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who also accused Trump in a separate case of conspiring to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.
>
> Smith dropped both cases after Trump won the November election, citing a longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
>
> At the time, prosecutors said they would continue the case against Nauta and De Oliveira, who faced obstruction charges.
>
> But after Trump took office, the acting U.S. attorney in south Florida, who had taken over the case from Smith, asked the appeals court to drop it.
Prosecutors asked the appeals court to intervene last year after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, dismissed the charges against Trump and his two co-defendants, ruling that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel.
>
> The court had not weighed in on that issue at the time prosecutors asked to drop the case.
>
> (Reporting by Andrew Goudsward, editing by Deepa Babington)
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/jack-smith-appeal-trump-classified-documents-case-00176380
“Congress has granted the Attorney General not only the power to appoint special counsels, but discretion to determine how much independence to give them,” Smith and his colleagues wrote in a brief that traces the history of such appointments back to the 1805s.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is mentioned in the article:
“For more than 20 years, I was a federal judge. Do I look like somebody who would make that basic mistake about the law? I don’t think so,” Garland told NBC News. “Our position is that it’s constitutional and valid. That’s why we appealed.”
“I will say that this was the same process of appointing special counsel as was followed in the previous administration,” the attorney general added. “Until now, every single court including the Supreme Court that has considered the legality of a special counsel appointment has upheld it.”
From today's WSJ piece titled "Jack Smith, You’re Fired" by William McGurn.
Here’s the Jack Smith dilemma: There’s no law establishing the special counsel—and he was appointed under Justice Department regulations. Nor has Mr. Smith been confirmed by the Senate. So we have the anomaly of a private citizen who enjoys vastly more power than any ordinary U.S. attorney, including virtually unlimited funding with little accountability.
This is misleading and irrelevant to the legal case.
McGurn has worked as a speechwriter, writer, and editor for right-of-center organizations and candidates. He doesn't have a legal background. It is not in McGurn's ideological groove nor financial interest to speak accurately and candidly about the legal issues at play.
From the LegalEagle YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/NmqcH-Xnvi4
"[Aileen Cannon's decision] is a completely bonkers made-up decision that flies in the face of the Constitution, Federal Statutes, Supreme Court authority (on point) and Federal Appeals Court decisions that are directly on point. It is partisan decision that has no chance of being upheld by the 11th Circuit. ... based on current law this decision is nuts."
Cannon ruled that Smith's appointment as special counsel overseeing Trump's federal indictments was a violation of the U.S. constitution's appointments clause, which mandates how federal officials are hired.
She also ruled that Smith's appointment was a violation of the appropriations clause, which mandates how taxpayers' money is spent.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jack-smith-aileen-cannon-florida-court-appeal-1927503
From what I understand, these claims fly in the face of precedent.
“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel,” Peter Carr, spokesman for Smith’s office, said in a statement Monday.