A Trump-appointed federal judge on Monday permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing a report by the special counsel Jack Smith detailing President Trump’s mishandling of reams of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.
The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was her latest effort in the past several months to keep the public from seeing Mr. Smith’s sprawling report — one of the most significant parts of his twin prosecutions of Mr. Trump that has yet to see the light of the day.
The order, issued from Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., slammed Mr. Smith for the “brazen stratagem” of drafting his report even after Judge Cannon had dismissed the classified documents case in July 2024 and found that he had been improperly appointed to his post as special counsel.
“To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the dismissal order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it,” Judge Cannon wrote on Monday.
Judge Cannon also ruled that releasing the report, which contains investigative materials that have never been made public, would “cause irreparable damage” to Mr. Trump and his two co-defendants and would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice in the process.”
Mr. Smith himself dropped the other case he brought against Mr. Trump — the one accusing him of seeking to overturn the 2020 election — after the 2024 election. The report about the election interference case, often described as Volume I of his work, was released to the public in January 2025.
But Volume II of Mr. Smith’s report has never been released even though special counsels appointed by both Republican and Democratic administrations have traditionally shown their work to the public. Volume II details Mr. Smith’s prosecution of Mr. Trump on charges of illegally retaining highly sensitive classified documents from his first stint in the White House and then conspiring with his co-defendants — Waltine Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira — to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to get the material back.
Last month, Mr. Smith testified in front of Congress about several aspects of his election interference prosecution, flatly accusing Mr. Trump of causing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But he has never been able to discuss his findings in the classified documents case publicly because Judge Cannon, who has repeatedly received lavish praise from the president, temporarily blocked the release of his report about it shortly before Mr. Trump returned to office.
The order on Monday made that preliminary ruling permanent — though it is unlikely to be the last word on the matter. Two watchdog groups, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute, have been trying for months to force the release of Mr. Smith’s report, filing a series of requests to the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Cannon.
“Judge Cannon’s ruling continues a troubling pattern of decisions that shield the president from public scrutiny and place secrecy above the public’s right to know,” Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement issued Monday. “By permanently blocking the release of Volume II of the special counsel’s report and denying our effort to seek a stay while our appeal moves forward, the court has ensured that the public is denied information of extraordinary national importance.”
Judge Cannon’s decision came in response to a request from Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who had argued that Volume II of Mr. Smith’s report should never be released outside the Justice Department because it was the work product of a special counsel who never should have been appointed in the first place. Lawyers for Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira made an even broader request, asking Judge Cannon to destroy all copies of the report.
While the judge granted Mr. Trump’s request, she rejected the effort to have all remaining copies of Volume II destroyed. In an unusual, but perhaps unsurprising, move, the Justice Department weighed in on the issue last month, agreeing with Mr. Trump and telling Judge Cannon that the report should remain sealed.
“The illicit product of an unlawful investigation and prosecution belongs in the dustbin of history,” prosecutors wrote. “The United States will leave it there.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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