After a last-minute legal battle, Jack Smith’s final report on his criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election is one step closer to becoming public.
On Monday, Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected arguments from Trump and his now-former co-defendants in the classified documents case who have tried to stop the Department of Justice from releasing the entire report.
Her decision clears the way for Attorney General Merrick Garland to partially release Smith’s report to the public once her initial three-day injunction expires at midnight Monday — less than a week before Trump returns to the White House.
Last week, the Trump-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked both volumes of Smith’s report from the public, including the results of his investigation into Trump’s election subversion — a case that played out in an entirely different court in Washington, D.C.
Garland had vowed to release the Mar-a-Lago report to top members of Congress while publicly releasing the volume on Trump’s election case, with only days left to spare before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, when he can stop both volumes from ever being released.
Smith — the former Hague prosecutor who was appointed as special counsel to oversee the two federal criminal cases against the president-elect — turned in his final two-volume report to Garland last week. He resigned from the Justice Department on Friday.
Cannon will hold a hearing on January 17 to determine whether the members of Congress can review the Mar-a-Lago report.
In a shock decision last year, Judge Cannon dismissed the Mar-a-Lago case after agreeing with Trump’s attorneys that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed and funded. Smith’s team appealed that decision, but then dropped Trump as a defendant after his election. The case against his co-defendants Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira is ongoing.
In court filings over the weekend, Justice Department attorneys argued that “nothing” in the volume on election interference “directly or indirectly refers, relies, or bears in any respect upon any evidence or argument relevant to any of the charges” against Nauta and De Oliveira.
Attorneys for the men told the court that prosecutors are “driven by political priorities that have no place in a criminal trial setting” and are trying to “strong-arm” the case against them.
Smith’s report is expected to present an exhaustive summary of the case against the former president, which never reached a trial. Smith effectively closed the case following Trump’s election victory.
The fullest account yet of Trump’s alleged crimes in that case were presented across 165 pages last October, with a filing that details Trump’s “increasingly desperate efforts” to cling to power with “knowingly false claims of election fraud,” culminating in his failure to stop a mob of his supporters from breaking into the U.S. Capitol in January 6, 2021.
The lengthy filing traces the history of Trump’s bogus narrative of fraud and his state-by-state efforts to validate a scheme to reverse the loss, then organize allies to submit fraudulent election certificates falsely stating that he won.
