Opinion | Judge Cannon and JD Vance Are on the Same Team

In the days since Judge Aileen Cannon issued her inexplicable 93-page dismissal of the classified-documents case against Donald Trump, I’ve been coming back to something JD Vance said on a podcast in 2021.

Mr. Vance, the Ohio senator and now Mr. Trump’s running mate, predicted on the podcast that the former president, who had been recently disgraced by his insurrectionary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, would nevertheless run again in 2024. Should Mr. Trump win, Mr. Vance said, he had some advice: “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And if the courts ruled against him? No problem, Mr. Vance said: Just blow them off.

“We are in a late republican period,” he added, alluding to weakness in the ancient Roman Republic. “If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

His interviewer, Jack Murphy, prominent in the right-wing pro-masculinity world, agreed and said, “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.” Mr. Murphy said it was necessary “to become a little more robust in our behavior” in order to “refound the country,” and Mr. Vance responded, “That’s exactly right.”

This exchange — with its disregard for the rule of law, its mockery of expertise and its elevation of outcome over process — gets to the heart of what is so alarming about the dismissal of the documents case, which had been widely regarded as the most airtight of the prosecutions of Mr. Trump. (As a reminder: He removed large quantities of classified national security documents from the White House without authorization, he refused to return them when asked politely, and he lied to the officials who tried to collect them.)

Judge Cannon’s rationale for tossing the case was that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who brought the charges, was not validly appointed to his post because no federal law authorizes the appointment of someone from outside the Justice Department to perform that task. “Mr. Smith is a private citizen exercising the full power of a United States attorney, and with very little oversight or supervision,” she wrote.