Judge Aileen Cannon blocks release of special counsel Jack Smith report on Trump classified documents case

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Jan 21, 2025

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Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday blocked the release of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report into President Donald Trump’s now-defunct classified documents case, raising the odds it will ever see the light of day.

The Florida federal judge, who has delivered a string of Trump-friendly rulings in the case, ordered the Department of Justice not to share the classified documents portion of Smith’s final report with top leaders from the House and Senate, or anyone else.

Cannon barred prosecutors from “releasing, distributing, conveying or sharing with anyone outside the Department of Justice any information or conclusions” of the report.

Her ruling was aimed at former Attorney General Merrick Garland but applies to his Trump-appointed successor.

“The bare wishes of (the attorney general) to comply with a non-existent ‘historical practice’ of releasing Special Counsel reports … is not a valid reason,” Cannon wrote.

The practical impact of the ruling is a bit murky because it seems unlikely that Trump’s Department of Justice would have handed over the document to congressional leaders anyway.

But Cannon’s edict makes it less likely that the public will ever get to see Smith’s assessment’s of Trump’s actions in the case, one of two federal criminal cases that were effectively upended by the new president’s November election win and return to power.

Trump was charged with illegally taking hundreds of secret government documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he left office in 2021 and defying the government’s efforts to get them back.

The FBI famously found the documents when they searched Trump’s waterfront club in Palm Beach in August 2023.

Legal analysts long considered the documents case to be the more straightforward of the two federal cases against Trump spearheaded by Smith, the other one being the Jan. 6 election interference case.

But Cannon handed Trump several lifelines with favorable legal rulings and eventually dismissed the case on the grounds that Smith was improperly appointed. He was appealing that ruling when Trump won reelection.

Smith pulled the plug on both federal cases, citing guidelines that bar the feds from prosecuting a sitting president.

As his last act, Smith penned a two-volume report dealing with both cases. Attorney General Merrick Garland released the Jan. 6 report after Cannon briefly blocked the entire report.

Prosecutors agreed not to publicly release the documents portion of the report because two of Trump’s co-defendants theoretically could still face charges in the case. That possibility seems beyond remote now that Trump is back in the White House and could order prosecutors to scrap the case or pardon them.