Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

From the first moment you enter the federal government, you learn about the obligation to protect federal documents. All federal employees must complete record management training which includes mandatory annual refreshers. You learn that you cannot take classified or sensitive records during employment or when you leave federal service. The responsibility is drilled in.

So the dismissal of the Florida documents case against President-elect Trump sends a message. There are two standards of conduct: one for Trump and one for all other federal employees. Every federal employee knows their goose would be cooked for any records violation.

Small-fry government employees will get crucified for mistakenly emailing personally identifiable information (PII) to a home computer, but the president-elect can make an absolute mockery of the rules and he skates.

Even without a trial, we know Trump’s behavior was egregious. The boxes and boxes of records he pilfered and sequestered in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and gilded ballroom became visible to the nation and they raised so many questions. What was that about? What documents did he take and why did he take them? Were there nuclear secrets? Spy secrets? Considering Trump’s greed it is hard not to think he had some plan to cash in. The documents were not souvenirs.

The indictment said hundreds of classified documents were taken from the White House, including sensitive documents about our nuclear capabilities. He repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records investigators sought. The indictment details a July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster property where Trump bragged about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country. Trump aides lied to the FBI about the movement of boxes at Mar-a-Lago.

I guess we will never know the true story as the Department of Justice is dismissing the case in light of Trump’s re-election. The case against two co-defendants still could proceed but, of course, Trump could pardon them. The system failed us. No one else has gotten away with anything like this. All we may get is a final report as is required by the special counsel regulations.

Of all the cases against Trump, and there were multiple strong ones, the documents case stood out for its brazen contempt for rules and law. Before the case was assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, I assumed it would be the easiest case to prove of the multiple cases in which Trump was a defendant. Whatever his lame excuses, he absconded with documents he had no right to possess. There is no exception in the federal law. The evidence was overwhelming.

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But things did not work out that way. Trump drew a judge who was in the bag for him. How did it happen that he drew Cannon? Aren’t judges supposed to be randomly and rotationally assigned to avoid preordained outcomes and the appearance of impropriety?

Judge Cannon had already been assigned to sit on the earlier case where Trump sued about the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago. In that case, she made bizarre rulings that were reversed by the 11th Circuit. Trump had tried unsuccessfully to get Cannon as a judge in an earlier case where he had sued Hillary Clinton.

The journalist/lawyer James Zirin provided the best explanation I have seen for why Cannon got picked again to sit on a Trump case. He wrote that prosecutor Jack Smith could have filed the documents case in Washington D.C. but he probably worried about a change of venue motion causing delay and he figured he had decent odds to obtain an impartial judge in Florida. There are 26 federal court judges in the Southern District of Florida.

What Smith may not have known is that the Southern District is administratively divided into five divisions. Cannon was the only judge sitting in Fort Pierce which was treated as part of the Palm Beach Division. The pool of judges eligible to try the documents case was not 26 but four. One of the four was a senior judge so the eligible pool was three and Trump lucked out.

Judge Cannon was the answer to Trump’s prayers. She was a known quantity as a Federalist Society member and as an extreme loyalist. She had demonstrated that in the earlier Mar-a-Lago search case. In the last days of his first administration, Trump had picked her to be a federal judge and got it through the Senate.

She now appears to be paying him back. She dismissed the documents case by ruling that the Attorney General lacked the authority to appoint a special counsel. In making the ruling, she disregarded years of precedent and a landmark Supreme Court decision, United States v Nixon.

It was a wild ruling. She relied on the thinnest of reeds, a Clarence Thomas concurrence in the presidential immunity case just decided. That was a solo concurrence. In that case, Trump had not even raised the legality of the special counsel, it was not briefed and it was irrelevant to the decision. If there had been a case going forward (there is not), it is highly unlikely Cannon’s opinion would have survived scrutiny.

But still we are left with the reality that Jack Smith is dismissing the documents case because of the U.S. Department of Justice’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president. It is a policy choice not based on any law or binding precedent. The argument is that such a prosecution would impede the president’s ability to govern. As with the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, hobbling the president’s ability to act in office is the big concern.

Contrary to most legal observers, I think the Department of Justice (DOJ) policy against prosecuting a sitting president is ill-advised. Our Founders did not want a monarch. Americans fought the Revolutionary War against King George III to prevent being subjected to rule by a tyrant. Now we have a situation where we have an authoritarian president who has placed himself above the law.

Where are our much-vaunted checks and balances? Who will rein in a rogue president? Where is the accountability if the president behaves criminally? It would appear the president-elect has a blank check to break any law and the Supreme Court says that is fine.

Where the DOJ went wrong in their memo about not indicting a sitting president is their under estimation of the human capacity for malevolence. The drafters of that policy no doubt assumed, whether the candidate was Republican or Democratic, that the president would abide by our constitutional system. They failed to consider the possibility Americans could elect a fascist who had little use for laws or constitutions. They remained moderate institutionalists unable to anticipate authoritarianism.

As I believe Judge Chutkan wrote, presidents are not kings. They should not be above the law. No one should be. Stealing federal documents is certainly not the biggest of Trump’s crimes but I would suggest that tolerating this violation sets a dangerous precedent. We can expect many more such violations in the years ahead.