Judge denies bid to block release of Jack Smith’s report on Trump election interference case

Federal Judge Aileen Cannon cleared the way for the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the 2020 election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump.

She blocked a request from Mr. Trump’s co-defendants to stop the release of the two-volume report. Still, a temporary injunction stops the immediate release of the report. The earliest it could come out is midnight Tuesday.

“The Court sees an insufficient basis to grant emergency injunctive relief as to Volume I,” Judge Cannon, who was nominated to her position by Mr. Trump, wrote in a court filing Monday.

She set a hearing for Friday to determine whether to release the report’s second volume, which details the case against Mr. Trump for keeping classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office. She had previously temporarily blocked the release of the full report.

The Justice Department said last week that the second volume of Mr. Smith’s report regarding the classified documents case would be withheld for as long as the case against Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, remains pending. The department said a redacted version would be made available “in light of congressional interest in the work” of Mr. Smith to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees as long as they promise not to release it.

“All parties agree that Volume II expressly and directly concerns this criminal proceeding,” Judge Cannon wrote. “All parties also appear to agree that public release of Volume II would be inconsistent with the fair trial rights of Defendants Nauta and De Oliveira and with Department of Justice Policy governing the release of information during the pendency of criminal proceedings.”

The Friday hearing will determine if the redacted version will still be made available.

“The Court is not willing to make that gamble on the basis on generalized interest by members of Congress, at least not without full briefing and a hearing on the subject,” she wrote. “Nor has the United States presented any justification to support the suggestion that Volume II must be released to Congress now, as opposed to after a reasonable period for an expedited hearing and judicial deliberation on the subject.”

Judge Cannon dismissed the classified documents case in July after ruling that Mr. Smith was appointed as special counsel unconstitutionally. Mr. Smith vowed to appeal the decision, but after Mr. Trump won the November election he dropped it, along with the 2020 election interference case.

Mr. Smith resigned from his position on Friday after giving his final report to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It’s unclear if attorneys for Mr. Trump and the two co-defendants will appeal this to a higher court. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals already declined an earlier request from them to block the report’s release.

Before Judge Cannon’s decision, Mr. Trump railed against the release of the report. He asked why “deranged” Mr. Smith “would be allowed to issue a ‘report’ on a complete and total Witch Hunt against me, strictly for political purposes, when he was thrown off the case and ultimately dismissed by the DOJ.”

“Therefore, to put it nicely, he was illegitimately involved in this political persecution, and all of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by our hapless government were,  simply put, wasted!” he wrote Sunday on social media. “He has already filled thousands of rejected statements and documents against me, which were a ‘joke,’ and the public just voted for me, in a landslide, to be their President.”