U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon may have dealt one final legal blow to former Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors.
On Friday, she said that she was not inclined to allow Smith and his team to hand over a redacted report to Congress on the classified documents case brought against now-President-elect Donald Trump, CNN reported.
“At the end of the day, what’s the urgency of doing this right now?” the judge said to Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro.
“Friday, Cannon peppered Shapiro with questions about why the department was offering the report to Congress now when there is a possibility that the prosecution against Trump’s former codefendants could be revived. Cannon dismissed the case against them last summer but that ruling is on appeal,” the report said.
The attorney admitted that she did not have an answer to the question but said that only certain Congress members would see the report behind closed doors, and they would not be permitted to share its contents and Smith’s findings.
“Still, the judge demanded examples of when the department has disclosed non-public information to Congress from its investigatory work when the matters weren’t fully closed,” the report said.
“Cannon noted that in past examples of the department releasing a special counsel’s report, those reports had been disclosed after a ‘moment of finality’ when there was ‘no doubt,’” it said.
Smith officially resigned from his job at the Department of Justice last month.
He made the announcement after he brought two cases against Trump that were both ended after Trump won the election, The New York Times reported.
In a footnote in a motion that he filed with Cannon at the time, he said that his work was done and he was no longer with the Department of Justice as of earlier this month.
“The Special Counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and separated from the Department on January 10,” the footnote said.
The motion asked the judge not to extend a court order blocking the release of his report.
“Mr. Smith’s resignation left unfinished one last step in the more than two-year odyssey he undertook by investigating and ultimately bringing charges against Mr. Trump: the release of a two-volume report detailing his decision-making in both criminal cases,” The Times reported.
“Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants in the documents case have been fighting fiercely for the past week to stop the release of both volumes. In court papers, they have assailed the report as a ‘one-sided’ and ‘unlawful’ political attack against the president-elect and complained it unfairly implicates some unnamed “anticipated” members of his incoming administration,” the report said.
“The report amounts to Mr. Smith’s valedictory word on the work he started when he was first appointed in November 2022, shortly after Mr. Trump announced he was running again for president. It contains his explanations of why he brought the charges he did in the two cases as well as his legal reasoning for not bringing other charges,” it said.
Separately, a federal appeals court earlier turned down a request to keep part of Smith’s final report from going public. The report includes details of Smith’s investigation and prosecution of Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election and supposed improper retention of classified records.
Walt Nauta, a Trump aide, and Carlos de Oliveira, a former property manager at Mar-a-Lago, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to deny their request. They were charged with blocking a separate federal investigation into Trump’s handling of sensitive government records.
The court told the DOJ that they couldn’t release the report for three days, Fox News reported.
