Trump special counsel report release left in limbo by court

Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg News on Jan 9, 2025

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WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court won’t block Attorney General Merrick Garland from releasing a special counsel’s report detailing the findings of his criminal investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.

But in a Thursday order rejecting requests by Trump and his former co-defendants to stop the report from becoming public, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also didn’t immediately clear Garland to disclose it. The court said that if the government wanted to share the document sooner, it would have to separately challenge a lower-court order that delayed any release by at least another three days.

In the meantime, lawyers for the Trump associates who challenged the report’s release could petition the full 11th Circuit to reconsider the court’s order or ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. It wasn’t immediately clear if they could also go back to the lower-court judge, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and pursue their initial request for her to permanently block the report’s release.

The court didn’t identify which judges entered the order and didn’t offer a reason for the denial of the emergency request.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, as did lawyers for the two former Trump co-defendants who are pressing the fight in court, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that while the report’s release is still on hold, “it is time for Joe Biden and Merrick Garland to do the right thing and put a final stop to the political weaponization of our Justice system.”

The 11th Circuit’s order comes as Garland is in a race against time to share at least some of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final work with the public. Once Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, he would have the authority to direct Garland’s successor to keep the document secret.

Trump isn’t formally part of the legal fight because Smith dropped his pursuit of charges against the president-elect after his November win, citing long-standing department policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. But Trump’s lawyers wrote separately to Garland to oppose the report becoming public and Trump submitted an amicus, or friend-of-court, brief in the 11th Circuit.

“The report is nothing less than another attempted political hit job which sole purpose is to disrupt the Presidential transition and undermine President Trump’s exercise of executive power,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a Jan. 8 filing.

Garland intends to release the first volume of the report to the public, which deals with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s court filings. For the second volume, which deals with Trump’s handling of classified information after leaving the White House in 2021, Garland plans to share a copy only with several senior members of Congress until a related criminal case is finished.

Smith was required by law to write a report and submit it to Garland, who makes the final decision about whether to release some or all of it to the public. Trump’s former co-defendants in one of the cases brought by Smith’s office have been fighting in court to stop that from happening, and Trump also has expressed opposition to the report’s release.

Nauta and De Oliveira kicked off the fight over Smith’s report earlier this week when they asked Cannon to stop it from being released.

Cannon, who was appointed to the south Florida federal district court by Trump, temporarily barred the publication of Smith’s report while the 11th Circuit considered the issue. Cannon also wrote that her order would remain in effect for three days after the 11th Circuit made a decision.

Earlier this year, Cannon had dismissed the indictment after finding that Smith’s appointment and funding source were unconstitutional. The Justice Department pointed to its pending appeal of Cannon’s ruling, which was still active against Nauta and De Oliveira, as the reason Garland would delay making the second volume of Smith’s report public.

(Chris Strohm contributed to this report.)