The Daily Populous Wednesday January 8th, 2025 night edition
Authored by cnn.com and submitted by coasterghost

District Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday blocked the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.

The court fight that prompted Cannon’s order is the capstone of Trump’s yearslong assault on the institution of special counsels, and the president-elect is seeking to capitalize on his earlier victories that undermined Smith’s office.

Those victories include Cannon’s ruling last summer finding Smith to be unconstitutionally appointed, a Supreme Court decision that enshrined sweeping immunity for actions presidents take while in office, and Smith’s own recent acknowledgement that Trump must be dropped from both cases now that he has been reelected to the White House.

The defense lawyers are raising new questions about what those legal developments mean for the long-standing practice of special counsels’ reports becoming public — a practice that includes the publication of reports by special counsels Robert Mueller, John Durham and Robert Hur, and going back further, under a previous law, the release of independent counsel Ken Starr’s report on his probe into President Bill Clinton.

Until Cannon’s intervention Tuesday, the question of what was publicly released from the report was up to Attorney General Merrick Garland. But Cannon’s order prevents Smith and the Justice Department from moving forward with publishing the report until the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals has time to review an emergency motion filed there by Trump’s former co-defendants seeking to block the report’s release.

The latest move by Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge, came amid a flurry of legal filings Monday night and Tuesday. Lawyers for Trump have reviewed a draft of Smith’s final report related to federal investigations into the president-elect. Trump, as well as his former co-defendants in the classified documents case, claim that Smith does not have the power to even assemble the report and that any publication of Smith’s report by Garland would violate Justice Department policy, practice and the law.

The gambit is unfolding against the backdrop of the political reality that, come inauguration, the efforts to restore some of the special counsel’s powers and prosecutions will end.

That reality represents just the political influence that the office of special counsel was designed to resist, especially when those prosecutors are assigned to investigate prominent political candidates or elected officials and the DOJ seeks to insulate them from changing presidential administrations.

The issue of Smith’s final report being made public now moves to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, with Cannon’s order Tuesday preventing Smith or the Justice Department from transmitting the report outside the DOJ while the appeals court considers the emergency request from Trump’s former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. (Nauta and De Oliveira have pleaded not guilty. The case against them was dismissed by Cannon, but it could be revived in appeals over the special counsel’s authority.)

Cannon’s brief order did not distinguish between the two volumes said to be in the report — one dealing with the classified documents probe and the other covering Smith’s investigation into 2020 election interference.

In court filings earlier Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers said the arguments against publication of the report applied to both volumes, while pointing to the overlap in evidence.

Report wouldn’t be released until Friday at the earliest

Garland has told Congress he plans to provide lawmakers with the report, allowing for redactions required under Justice Department policy. That would mean the DOJ would likely redact portions of the report related to the two co-defendants since the department is seeking to continue those cases and is prohibited from prejudicing their potential trials.

In an overnight court filing, Smith’s office laid out more of the timeline on the planned finalization of the report. The special counsel’s office said it would not hand the report over to the attorney general until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, and that the soonest the attorney general would release it publicly was Friday morning.

“The Attorney General has not yet determined how to handle the report volume pertaining to this case, about which the parties were conferring at the time the defendants filed the motion,” Smith’s team wrote. The special counsel’s office indicated the report would have two volumes: likely one related to the documents case and another related to the separate January 6, 2021-related federal charges against Trump.

Federal regulations guiding the special counsel’s office work at the Justice Department put decisions about the release of reports like these in the hands of the attorney general.

The fast-moving dispute comes less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, at which point his Justice Department — to be led largely by appointees drawn from his criminal defense team in the case before Cannon — will take over the handling of the investigation.

While Cannon dismissed the classified documents case last summer, the Justice Department is appealing her ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Trump himself was dropped from the prosecution, on the request of the special counsel, after his reelection last year, but the prosecution of Nauta and De Oliveira has been handed off to the US attorney’s office in South Florida.

Pointing to the possibility that the criminal prosecution against them could be revived, Nauta and De Oliveira argued in court filings Monday that the release of the report would “irreversibly and irredeemably” prejudice them as defendants. They also noted the protective order limiting what they can say about the discovery the government has provided them remains in place.

Because the defendants are “strictly precluded form refuting the Report,” releasing it would make it “even more unfairly prejudicial,” they said.

“The Final Report is meant to serve as a Government verdict against the Defendants contrary to all criminal justice norms and constitutional guideposts,” they argued to the judge.

The president-elect on Tuesday attacked what he called the “weaponization of justice” by Democrats and Smith during a long news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“I defeated deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged individual. I guess he’s on his way back to The Hague,” Trump said, referring to Smith’s background prosecuting war crimes. “And we won those cases. Those were the biggest ones. And the press made such a big deal out of them. But we did nothing wrong.”

Trump’s lawyers, who filed their own friend-of-the court brief with Cannon on Tuesday morning, are embracing Nauta and De Oliveira’s arguments, while raising Trump-specific claims about the way the report’s release would supposedly interfere with his transition back into the White House.

In a letter to Garland made public with the filings, the Trump team seized on past Justice Department assertions that a sitting president cannot be subject to criminal prosecutions. They also noted Smith himself acknowledged that principle in seeking the dismissal of the prosecutions he brought against Trump. The letter to Garland also made reference to the Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling, which established a very high bar for when official acts by a president can be prosecuted.

Under the current regime of special counsel regulations, Trump’s lawyers claimed to Garland, the “DOJ has not released a single Special Counsel report concerning any individual who has mounted a successful defense in court, as President Trump has done with respect to Presidential immunity.”

It has also been department policy and practice to redact information in special counsel reports that pertain to ongoing DOJ cases. In past investigations, such as the Mueller probe, that has manifested in just a handful of sentences being redacted amid hundreds of pages. But the charges against Nauta and De Oliveira were deeply intertwined with the allegations against Trump, making it possible that much of that volume of the report would need to be hidden from public view.

Still, Trump’s lawyers are arguing the separate volume on election subversion should not be released as well, alleging Cannon’s ruling disqualifying Smith in the documents case ended his authority to release that aspect of his report as well.

The 11th Circuit, which was already considering the Justice Department’s appeal of Cannon’s disqualification of Smith, has asked for a response from prosecutors on Wednesday morning. Cannon’s order seemed to contemplate a potential appeal to the Supreme Court, as she said her order halting the report’s release will remain in place until three days after the appeals court issues its decision on the matter.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report.

dr_z0idberg_md on January 7th, 2025 at 17:24 UTC »

From this article, "Cannon's order on Tuesday noted that she did not make any determination as to whether the special counsel report should be released, but instead left the entire matter to the appeals court to decide."

Looks like Cannon knows she cannot block the report's release, only delay it by kicking it up to the appeals court. The report's release is legally up to the attorney general.

The_Bosdude on January 7th, 2025 at 17:13 UTC »

This judge is so obviously biased and in complete contempt of the US judicial system. She should be kicked off the court, tried for her abuse of our legal system and if found guilty, stripped of all honors and approvals.

EminorHeart on January 7th, 2025 at 17:09 UTC »

Leak it.