Judge Aileen Cannon temporarily blocked the Department of Justice from releasing special counsel Jack Smith‘s final report to the public in an order on Tuesday, saying an appellate court needed to address disputes about the report before its release.
Cannon issued the surprise decision after two co-defendants in President-elect Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida made an emergency request to the judge to block it. The co-defendants’ attorneys argued that they had reviewed the report and that its release would be prejudicial to their clients.
Their same request also remains pending before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and Cannon said her order would stay in place until the higher court issued a ruling.
The co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, had included in their request a letter Trump’s attorneys wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they blasted Smith’s report as a “partisan weapon” and urged the attorney general to withhold it from the public.
Trump’s attorneys, led by his deputy attorney general nominee, Todd Blanche, argued to Garland that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel and therefore not authorized to compile and release a special counsel report.
Federal regulation requires special counsels to compile a confidential report detailing their work once they conclude it, and the attorney general has discretion over whether to release it to the public.
Blanche’s team was, in recent days, able to review a hard copy of Smith’s unreleased two-volume report detailing his decisions to prosecute Trump, according to the letter to Garland. Trump’s attorneys said the report would cause a “media storm of false and unfair criticism” of the president-elect that would interfere with his transition responsibilities.
A spokesman for Smith declined to comment on Cannon’s order and instead pointed to a short notice Smith’s team submitted to the court Tuesday morning. In the notice, prosecutors said Garland had not yet decided whether he would release Smith’s report and that he definitely did not plan to release it before Friday.
Prosecutors also said they planned to submit more detailed arguments on the matter to the 11th Circuit at some point on Tuesday.
They indicated that the two volumes of Smith’s report corresponded to the two concurrent prosecutions he led against Trump: the case before Cannon in Florida related to classified documents and the case before Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the 2020 election. Smith was forced to terminate both cases after Trump’s election victory, but he kept open the prosecution against Trump’s co-defendants in Florida.
Trump’s attorneys hinted at some of the contents of the special counsel’s report in their letter to Garland, saying it included “baseless attacks” on Trump’s incoming administration officials and “pathetically transparent” criticisms of X.
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Cannon’s decision that Garland could not release the report drew skepticism from critics. They observed that she only blocked the DOJ from releasing the report and did not weigh in on Nauta and de Oliveira’s attorneys sharing select details from it, and they also questioned whether Cannon had authority over the entire report since she presided over only one of the prosecutions.
“No jurisdiction, no problem,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade wrote on X. “With Mar-a-Lago documents case in appeal, trial judge Cannon issues an order blocking release of Jack Smith’s report anyway. Wake up, 11th Circuit. Holidays are over. Trump is trying to run out the clock before Jan 20.”
