In her latest move benefiting Donald Trump, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted a request from him and his former co-defendants to block the release of Jack Smith’s report on the classified documents case he brought against them in Florida.
Cannon had dismissed the case in 2024 when Trump was running for president. The Justice Department was appealing her order, but dropped the appeal when he won the election, due to the DOJ’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
Explaining her reasoning on Monday, the Trump-appointed judge wrote, in part, that “there is the matter of manifest injustice to the former defendants that would result from disclosure of Volume II. Special Counsel Smith, acting without lawful authority, obtained an indictment in this action and initiated proceedings that resulted in a final order of dismissal of all charges.”
Volume I, Smith’s report on the other case he brought against Trump, regarding the 2020 election, was previously released before Trump took office again. Outside groups are pressing for the release of the documents report in a pending appeal.
In her order on Monday, Cannon also rejected a defense request to order the report’s destruction.
In the criminal case that she dismissed in 2024, Trump was accused of illegally retaining national defense information as well as obstruction. He had pleaded not guilty in the case that never went to trial. Only one of his four criminal cases went to trial, the so-called hush money case in New York, in which he was convicted and is appealing.
Cannon’s dismissal capped off a series of Trump-friendly moves in the criminal case, and her actions (and inactions) in litigation over the report since then have also benefited the president who appointed her, the latest example coming Monday.
When the DOJ dropped the documents case appeal against Trump after he won the 2024 election, the appeal was still active against his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. Cannon had cited the still-pending appeal as a reason to keep the report secret. But after Trump took office, the DOJ dropped the appeal against them, thus removing that rationale for secrecy (and preventing the appeals court from ruling on whether Cannon was correct to dismiss the case on unlawful appointment grounds).
The outside groups that are pressing the appeal over the report, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute, had sought to intervene in the case. It took Cannon so long to rule on their attempt to intervene that the federal appeals court with jurisdiction over Florida said in November that she had engaged in “undue delay” and ordered her to rule. When she finally did so in December, she acknowledged that the case was no longer pending against the co-defendants – thus removing her previous rationale for keeping the report secret – but she still gave the parties an opportunity to seek “appropriate relief.”
In response to that invitation, Trump filed a motion through a personal lawyer asking Cannon to permanently block the release of the report, and the DOJ lodged its own court filing saying that it agrees that the report shouldn’t be released outside the DOJ. Nauta and De Oliveira went even further in seeking an order from Cannon that all copies of the report be destroyed, which she rejected on Monday while granting the motion to block its release.
Her order specified that Attorney General Pam Bondi “or her successor(s), the Department of Justice, its officers, agents, officials, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals, are enjoined from (a) releasing, sharing, or transmitting Volume II of the Final Report or any drafts of Volume II outside the Department of Justice, or (b) otherwise releasing, distributing, conveying, or sharing with anyone outside the Department of Justice any information or conclusions in Volume II or in drafts thereof.”
