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District Judge Eileen Cannon on Tuesday blocked public release of the final report on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President-elect Donald Trump.
The legal battle that prompted Cannon’s order is the culmination of Trump’s years-long attack on the special counsel system, with the president-elect seeking to capitalize on an earlier victory that undermined Smith’s office.
These victories include last summer’s Cannon decision that ruled Smith’s appointment unconstitutional, the Supreme Court’s decision to provide blanket immunity for presidents’ actions while in office, and Trump’s re-election bid. These include Mr. Smith’s own recent admission that he should now be removed from both cases. white house.
The defense team argued that the long-standing practice of making special counsel reports public, including the release and retroactivity of special counsels Robert Mueller, John Durham, and Robert Hur. , raising new questions about what these legal developments mean. Additionally, under previous law, independent counsel Ken Starr’s report on the investigation into President Bill Clinton would be made public.
Until Cannon intervened Tuesday, it was up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide what would be made public from the report. But Cannon’s order gives Smith and the Justice Department time to consider an emergency motion filed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals by Trump’s former co-defendants seeking to block the report’s release. It was decided that the report could not be published until then.
The move by Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge, comes amid a flurry of lawsuits Monday night and Tuesday. Trump’s lawyers reviewed a draft of Smith’s final report related to the federal investigation into the president-elect. Mr. Trump and his former co-defendants in the classified documents case argue that Mr. Smith did not even have the authority to compile the report, and that Mr. Garland’s release of Mr. Smith’s report would violate Justice Department policy, practice, and law. I am doing it.
The maneuver is playing out against the backdrop of the political reality that efforts to restore some of the special counsel’s powers and prosecutions will end after he takes office.
That reality is especially true when prosecutors are assigned to investigate prominent political candidates or elected officials and the Department of Justice tries to keep them out of the presidential transition. It represents exactly the kind of political influence it is designed to resist.
The issue of releasing Smith’s final report now moves to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Cannon’s Tuesday order allows the appeals court to consider an emergency request from Trump’s former co-defendants. During that time, Smith and the Justice Department are prohibited from transmitting reports outside the Justice Department. , Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira. (Nauta and de Oliveira have maintained their innocence. The case against them was dismissed by Cannon, but the case could be reopened on appeal over the special counsel’s powers.)
Mr. Cannon’s brief order did not distinguish between the two volumes said to be included in the report — one on the classified documents investigation and the other on Mr. Smith’s investigation into 2020 election interference. It is.
Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing early Tuesday that their objections to the report’s publication apply to both volumes, pointing to duplication of evidence.
Garland told Congress he plans to provide lawmakers with a report that will allow them to make the edits required under Justice Department policy. This means the Justice Department will likely redact parts of the report related to the two co-defendants. The department is seeking to proceed with these cases and is prohibited from prejudicing their potential trials.
In a court filing overnight, Smith’s office detailed the timeline for the expected finalization of the report. The special counsel’s office said it would turn over the report to the attorney general as early as Tuesday afternoon, and the attorney general would release the report as early as Friday morning.
“The Attorney General has not yet decided how to handle the volume of reports in this case, which the parties were discussing at the time defendant filed his motion,” Smith’s team wrote. The Office of the Special Counsel has indicated that the report will be in two parts, one related to the documents case and the other related to the Jan. 6, 2021, incident against Trump. The charges are likely to be related to separate federal charges.
Federal rules governing the special counsel’s work at the Justice Department leave decisions about the release of such reports in the hands of the attorney general.
The whirlwind controversy comes with less than two weeks until Trump’s inauguration, when the Justice Department, which will be led primarily by appointees drawn from the Cannon criminal defense team, will take over handling of the investigation. .
Cannon dismissed the classified documents case last summer, but the Justice Department is appealing his ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Mr. Trump himself was withdrawn from the prosecution at the request of a special counsel after his reelection last year, but the charges against Mr. Nauta and Mr. de Oliveira were turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida.
In a court filing Monday, Nauta and de Oliveira raised the possibility that criminal charges against them could be reinstated, saying that the release of the report would be “irreversible and irreparable” for them as defendants. He argued that it would prejudice them. They also noted that a protective order is currently in place that limits what they can say about the findings provided by the government.
They said the defendants were “strictly prohibited from contesting the report” and would be “further unfairly disadvantaged” if the report were made public.
“The final report is intended to serve as the government’s verdict against the defendant, contrary to all criminal justice norms and constitutional guidelines,” they argued to the judge.
The president-elect attacked what he called the “weaponization of justice” by Democrats and Smith during a lengthy press conference Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, mansion.
“I took down a deranged Jack Smith. He’s a crazy man. I think he’s on his way back to The Hague,” Trump said, referring to Smith’s history prosecuting war crimes. “And we won those cases. They were the biggest ones. And the press covered them a lot. But we did nothing wrong.”
Trump’s lawyers, who filed their own amicus brief with Cannon on Tuesday morning, accepted Nauta and de Oliveira’s arguments, but said the release of the report would prevent Trump from returning to whiteness. It raises a unique claim. house.
In a letter to Garland released with the filing, the Trump team built on past Justice Department arguments that sitting presidents are not subject to criminal prosecution. They also noted that Mr. Smith himself acknowledged that principle in asking for the charges he brought against Mr. Trump to be dismissed. The letter to Garland also cited the Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity decision, which set a very high bar for prosecution of official actions by the president.
Under current special counsel regulations, President Trump’s lawyers told Garland that “the Department of Justice will not be able to issue special counsel requests regarding individuals successfully defended in court, as President Trump did with respect to presidential immunity.” They have not released any reports.”
It is also the Department’s policy and practice to redact information in special counsel reports related to ongoing Department of Justice cases. In previous investigations, such as the Mueller investigation, this has manifested itself in the redaction of just a few sentences across hundreds of pages. But the charges against Mr. Nauta and Mr. de Oliveira are so intertwined with those against Mr. Trump that large portions of the report may need to be hidden from public view.
Still, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue that Mr. Cannon’s decision disqualifying Mr. Smith in the documents case also terminated his authority to release that part of the report, and that a separate volume on election destruction should be released as well. claims not to be.
The 11th Circuit was already considering Cannon’s appeal of the Justice Department’s disbarment of Smith, and asked prosecutors for a response Wednesday morning. Cannon’s order appears to allow for a possible appeal to the Supreme Court, and she said the injunction to block publication of the report will remain in effect until three days after the Court of Appeal rules on the issue. Ta.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report.
