Former President Donald Trump and his legal team are urging an appellate court to uphold the dismissal of the case that Special Counsel Jack Smith brought against him in Florida. 

This is according to a new report from the Associated Press.

The case, as will be demonstrated, has already been thrown out. Smith has already lost at the lower federal court level.

He, however, is currently asking an appellate court to bail him out - to resurrect the case.

Background

This is all taking place in the classified documents case that Smith brought against Trump. This is the one in which Smith alleged that Trump improperly handled classified documents after leaving the White House and then obstructed the government's attempts to get those documents back.

The case started off at a district court in Florida, where it was overseen by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

Cannon, relying on a Supreme Court opinion, found that the Biden-Harris administration's appointment of Smith was improper, and, thus, Cannon dismissed the case.

Democrats, including Smith, have been trying to paint Cannon as a Republican partisan, but the criticism does not really seem to hold up to scrutiny. Legal experts on both sides of the aisle have argued that Cannon's decision making in the case was reasonable.

Now, however, Smith has taken the matter to the appellate level.

"Unlawful crusade"

Smith is essentially arguing that Cannon's decision in the case ignored legal precedent regarding the appointment of people like himself.

Trump's team disagrees. They did so in a legal filing that they submitted to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court on Friday.

“There is not, and never has been, a basis for Jack Smith’s unlawful crusade against President Trump. For almost two years, Smith has operated unlawfully, backed by a largely unscrutinized blank check drawn on taxpayer dollars,” Trump's team wrote.

They continued by arguing that Smith "has operated without the type of oversight and accountability that are hallmarks of inferior officers." They argued that Smith's seemingly unlimited tenure is not typical for such an appointment and that his jurisdiction goes beyond that which is usually afforded to such positions.

At the time of this writing, there is no real telling how the appellate court is going to rule. Legal experts have argued that the legality of Smith's appointment is not an open-and-shut type of issue. Rather, it is a nuanced one that can be legitimately argued both ways.