Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick, host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the rule of law and the Supreme Court.

We are releasing a bonus episode for our plus subscribers, and I wanted to share some of it with you.

And, well, bonus doesn't quite capture the feeling for this episode.

Lawless is a lot more like it.

In a shocking move on Monday morning, Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been overseeing the Trump-Stolen Documents

prosecution in Florida dismissed the entire criminal case against the former president on the grounds

that Jack Smith, the special counsel, was appointed unconstitutionally under the

appointments clause.

Matthew Seligman joined me to explain what just happened.

He argued for the constitutionality of the special counsel in Judge Cannon's federal

district courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida, just last month.

Matthew is a partner at Striss and Marr and a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at

Stanford Law School with a focus on election law.

And here is a part of our conversation.

Can we just start with the very, very basics?

And would you outline for us how Jack Smith came to be appointed? What was the

case he was trying to bring? What Jack Smith's role was in this case? Sure. So Jack Smith was

appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. And he was appointed to prosecute, to investigate, and then potentially

prosecute former President Trump and potentially others in relation to two specific incidents.

The first incident is the events leading to January 6th, and the second is the potential unlawful retention of classified

documents by the former president, primarily at his home Mar-a-Lago in Florida. And so when the

Attorney General appointed Jack Smith as special counsel, the reason to do that is because the special counsel has a certain degree of

...