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 handling 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 in 2024 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 ruled that releasing the report, known as volume II, would disclose secret grand jury material and cause irreparable harm to the president. She endorsed the view of Trump's lawyers, including Todd Blanche, now US deputy attorney general, that the report should never be released because the prosecutor who wrote it was unlawfully appointed.
Cannon acknowledged that previous special counsels, such as Robert Mueller, had written reports that were later publicly released. However, she blocked Smith from doing the same, arguing that the circumstances of the case—in which Trump was charged but never brought to trial—made it unfair for details to be made public.
Volume II of Smith's report is understood to contain details about Trump's efforts to retain classified documents at Mar-a-Lago 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, Smith challenged the decision but dropped the appeal following Trump's re-election and resigned.
