A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump has permanently barred the US justice department from releasing former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club. The ruling by US district judge Aileen Cannon on Monday prevents the report from being sent to Congress or made publicly available.
In a scathing 15-page decision, Cannon condemned Smith for what she called a “brazen stratagem” of compiling a report after she had dismissed the case on the grounds that he was unlawfully appointed. She wrote that the chronology represented “a concerning breach of spirit of the dismissal order, if not an outright violation of it”.
Cannon also ruled that releasing the report, known as volume II, would disclose secret grand jury material that could cause irreparable harm to the president. She endorsed the view of Trump’s personal lawyers, including Todd Blanche, now US deputy attorney general, that the report should never be released because the prosecutor who wrote it should never have been appointed.
While Cannon acknowledged that previous special counsels had written reports later publicly released by the justice department, she blocked Smith from doing the same. She argued that the circumstances of the case, in which Trump was charged but never brought to trial, meant it was unfair for details to be made public.
Volume II is understood to contain details about Trump’s efforts to retain highly classified documents and obstruct government attempts to retrieve them. Smith charged two co-defendants—valet Walt Nauta and employee Carlos de Oliveira—for moving boxes of documents after a grand jury subpoena. After Cannon dismissed the case in 2024, Smith appealed but later dropped it following Trump’s re-election and resigned.
