Trump spent years trying to undermine Jack Smith.

Now
he wants to block special counsel’s final word

By Tierney Sneed and Katelyn Polantz, CNN

7 minute read
Updated 4:13 PM EST, Tue January 7, 2025
From left: Jack Smith, Judge Aileen Cannon and Donald Trump

Getty Images/United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida/AP
CNN —

District Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday blocked the public release of special counsel
Jack Smith’s final report on his investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.

The court fight that prompted Cannon’s order is the capstone of Trump’s yearslong assault on
the institution of special counsels, and the president-elect is seeking to capitalize on his
earlier victories that undermined Smith’s office.

Those victories include Cannon’s ruling last summer finding Smith to be

unconstitutionally appointed, a Supreme Court decision that enshrined sweeping
immunity for actions presidents take while in office, and Smith’s own recent
acknowledgement that Trump must be dropped from both cases now that he has been
reelected to the White House.

The defense lawyers are raising new questions about what those legal developments mean for
the long-standing practice of special counsels’ reports becoming public — a practice that
includes the publication of reports by special counsels Robert Mueller, John
Durham and Robert Hur, and going back further, under a previous law, the release of
independent counsel Ken Starr’s report on his probe into President Bill Clinton.
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Until Cannon’s intervention Tuesday, the question of what was publicly released from the
report was up to Attorney General Merrick Garland. But Cannon’s order prevents Smith and
the Justice Department from moving forward with publishing the report until the 11th US
Circuit Court of Appeals has time to review an emergency motion filed there by Trump’s
former co-defendants seeking to block the report’s release.

The latest move by Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge, came amid a flurry of legal filings
Monday night and Tuesday. Lawyers for Trump have reviewed a draft of Smith’s final report
related to federal investigations into the president-elect. Trump, as well as his former co-
defendants in the classified documents case, claim that Smith does not have the power to
even assemble the report and that any publication of Smith’s report by Garland would violate
Justice Department policy, practice and the law.

The gambit is unfolding against the backdrop of the political reality that, come inauguration,
the efforts to restore some of the special counsel’s powers and prosecutions will end.

That reality represents just the political influence that the office of special counsel was
designed to resist, especially when those prosecutors are assigned to investigate prominent
political candidates or elected officials and the DOJ seeks to insulate them from changing
presidential administrations.

The issue of Smith’s final report being made public now moves to the 11th Circuit Court of
Appeals, with Cannon’s order Tuesday preventing Smith or the Justice Department from
transmitting the report outside the DOJ while the appeals court considers the emergency
request from Trump’s former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. (Nauta and
De Oliveira have pleaded not guilty. The case against them was dismissed by Cannon, but it
could be revived in appeals over the special counsel’s authority.)

Cannon’s brief order did not distinguish between the two volumes said to be in the report —
one dealing with the classified documents probe and the other covering Smith’s investigation
into 2020 election interference.

In court filings earlier Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers said the arguments against publication of
the report applied to both volumes, while pointing to the overlap in evidence.

Report wouldn’t be released until Friday at the earliest

Garland has told Congress he plans to provide lawmakers with the report, allowing for
redactions required under Justice Department policy. That would mean the DOJ would likely
redact portions of the report related to the two co-defendants since the department is seeking
to continue those cases and is prohibited from prejudicing their potential trials.

In an overnight court filing, Smith’s office laid out more of the timeline on the planned
finalization of the report. The special counsel’s office said it would not hand the report over
to the attorney general until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, and that the soonest the
attorney general would release it publicly was Friday morning.
“The Attorney General has not yet determined how to handle the report volume pertaining to
this case, about which the parties were conferring at the time the defendants filed the
motion,” Smith’s team wrote. The special counsel’s office indicated the report would have
two volumes: likely one related to the documents case and another related to the separate
January 6, 2021-related federal charges against Trump.

Federal regulations guiding the special counsel’s office work at the Justice Department put
decisions about the release of reports like these in the hands of the attorney general.
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sentencing

The fast-moving dispute comes less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, at which
point his Justice Department — to be led largely by appointees drawn from his criminal
defense team in the case before Cannon — will take over the handling of the investigation.

While Cannon dismissed the classified documents case last summer, the Justice
Department is appealing her ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.
Trump himself was dropped from the prosecution, on the request of the special counsel, after
his reelection last year, but the prosecution of Nauta and De Oliveira has been handed off to
the US attorney’s office in South Florida.

Pointing to the possibility that the criminal prosecution against them could be revived, Nauta
and De Oliveira argued in court filings Monday that the release of the report would
“irreversibly and irredeemably” prejudice them as defendants. They also noted the protective
order limiting what they can say about the discovery the government has provided them
remains in place.

Because the defendants are “strictly precluded form refuting the Report,” releasing it would
make it “even more unfairly prejudicial,” they said.

“The Final Report is meant to serve as a Government verdict against the Defendants contrary
to all criminal justice norms and constitutional guideposts,” they argued to the judge.