Defense Lawyers Seek to Block Special Counsel Report in Trump Documents Case

[cigaretteman]

Defense lawyers asked both the Justice Department and a federal judge on Monday night to stop the special counsel, Jack Smith, from publicly releasing a report detailing his investigation into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents after he left office in 2021.
The two-pronged attempt to block the report’s release arrived only two weeks before Mr. Trump is to be sworn in for a second term as president. With the case against Mr. Trump already dismissed, the report would essentially be Mr. Smith’s final chance to lay out damaging new details and evidence, if he has any.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in an aggressively worded letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, said they had recently been shown a draft copy of Mr. Smith’s report, calling it an example of the special counsel’s “politically motivated attack” against Mr. Trump. They demanded that Mr. Garland not allow Mr. Smith to make the report public and “remove him promptly” from his post.
“The release of any confidential report prepared by this out-of-control private citizen unconstitutionally posing as a prosecutor would be nothing more than a lawless political stunt, designed to politically harm President Trump,” the lawyers wrote. In separate court papers, lawyers for Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the classified documents case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, sought a more direct path toward stopping the release of Mr. Smith’s report. They asked the judge who oversaw the case, Aileen M. Cannon, to issue an emergency order to bar Mr. Smith from making the report public until the case “has reached a final judgment and appellate proceedings are concluded.”
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Read Defense Lawyers’ Arguments to Block a Trump Documents Case Report​

Lawyers for President-elect Donald J. Trump urged the attorney general in a letter to stop the special counsel from publicly releasing a final report on the case, while lawyers for his co-defendants, in a court filing, asked the same of the judge who oversaw the case.
Read Document 40 pages
Both attempts to block Mr. Smith could face an uphill battle.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have no power to force Mr. Garland to stop the report from coming out, and their letter amounted to little more than a belligerent request. It is also unclear whether Judge Cannon would have the authority to tell the attorney general how to handle a report by a special counsel that he himself appointed, especially when the case is technically out of her hands and in front of an appeals court.
That happened because Judge Cannon threw out the case in its entirety in July, ruling, in the face of decades of precedent, that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed as special counsel. Mr. Smith and his deputies challenged that decision, and it was being considered by a federal appeals court in Atlanta when Mr. Trump won the election in November.
Citing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, Mr. Smith dropped the appeal where Mr. Trump was concerned, effectively ending his role in the case. But he did not drop the appeal against Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira, and federal prosecutors in Florida now plan to pursue it when Mr. Smith steps down, likely before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
Mr. Smith has also moved to dismiss the other federal case he brought against Mr. Trump, accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. It remains unclear when Mr. Smith plans to file a report in that case and whether it will accompany the report on the documents prosecution or be contained in a separate document.

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The effort by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to block the release of the report was only their latest attempt to kill or push back any legal filings or proceedings that might be embarrassing or damaging to the president-elect.
Earlier on Monday, a state judge in Manhattan rejected Mr. Trump’s most recent attempt to delay his sentencing on 34 felony charges, saying that the hearing would go on as scheduled on Friday.
Justice Department regulations call for all special counsels to file reports to the attorney general explaining why they filed the charges they did, and why they decided not to file any other charges they might have been considering. The attorney general can then decide whether to release the report to the public.
It remains unclear when Mr. Smith was planning to finish his report in the classified documents case. But the lawyers for Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira said in their court papers that the report was likely to be released “within the next few days.”
Should either or both reports eventually see the light of day, it is possible they will not contain much in the way of new or revelatory information.
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The report in the classified documents case could be complicated by the fact that it would likely have to undergo a careful review by the intelligence community for any classified information it contained. The report in the election interference case might not break significant new ground, if only because in October Mr. Smith filed a sprawling, 165-page brief laying out the evidence he planned to offer at trial.
Still, in their letter to Mr. Garland, Mr. Trump’s lawyers complained that the draft report in the classified documents case said that Mr. Trump had “harbored a ‘criminal design’” and was the “head of the criminal conspiracies” detailed in the indictment. The draft also said, the lawyers wrote, that “Mr. Trump violated multiple federal criminal laws.”
Mr. Trump’s lawyers turned the tables on Mr. Smith, accusing him of “unethical” conduct and “improper activities.” Those accusations had possible implications for future retribution against Mr. Smith, given that two of the lawyers who signed the letter to Mr. Garland, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, have been chosen by Mr. Trump to serve in high positions in his Justice Department.While Mr. Garland has not said publicly whether he intends to release either report by Mr. Smith, he has done so in the past with other reports by other special counsels.
In February, for example, Mr. Garland permitted the release of a report by the special counsel Robert K. Hur concerning President Biden’s handling of classified materials after he served as vice president. The report concluded that criminal charges were not warranted, but also offered an unflattering assessment of Mr. Biden’s memory and cognitive capacity in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/us/politics/trump-classified-documents-case-jack-smith.html

 

[lucas80]

I was about to say that any competent judge would laugh at this request, then I saw that Aileen Cannon is going to leverage her ruling into a promotion, possibly even a nomination to the Supreme Court.

 

[soybean]

We, as a nation, are about to enter another dark age.

 

[tumorboy]

We, as a nation, are about to enter another dark age.

we’re keeping Fran until the end of his contract

 

[Macbride79]

Joe Biden should just release the report as an official act as President.

 

[cigaretteman]

The federal judge who handled President-elect Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents temporarily barred the Justice Department on Tuesday from releasing a final report about the case by the special counsel, Jack Smith.
In a brief ruling, Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who dismissed the documents case in its entirety this summer, enjoined Mr. Smith from sharing his report outside the Justice Department until a federal appeals court in Atlanta, which is now considering a challenge to her dismissal, makes a decision about how to handle the report.
Mr. Smith, who also investigated Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, has said in court filings that his final report will have two volumes: one for each of the indictments he brought against the president-elect. Judge Cannon’s order barring the release of the report did not appear to distinguish between the documents case, which she oversaw, and the election interference case, which Judge Tanya S. Chutkan heard in Washington.
Judge Cannon has a history of issuing unusual rulings in Mr. Trump’s favor. Early in the investigation that led to the documents indictment, she intervened in the case to impede the inquiry, only to be overruled by a conservative panel that sits over her, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
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Then this summer, in a surprise decision, she threw out the documents case in its entirety, ruling against decades of precedent that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland lacked the authority to appoint Mr. Smith to his post as special counsel.
Mr. Smith quickly appealed that ruling to the 11th Circuit. And while he ultimately dropped the appeal with regard to Mr. Trump after he won the election in November, the challenge still stands where Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, are concerned.
Judge Cannon’s ruling came even as Mr. Trump offered her lavish praise at a rambling news conference on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
“The judge in Florida, Judge Cannon, was brilliant and tough,” Mr. Trump said, adding that she was “a very strong and very brilliant judge.”
“That’s a big story,” Mr. Trump declared when he was informed about Judge Cannon’s decision.
Normally, when a case goes up on appeal, the trial judge loses legal power over it. And despite Mr. Trump’s blandishments about Judge Cannon, several legal scholars said on Tuesday that she had no authority to issue the order blocking the release of Mr. Smith’s report.

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“Cannon has no jurisdiction — there is no case in front of her,” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton, wrote in an email. “In fact, Cannon's decision sounds very much like her early decisions interfering with the prosecution of the case before the indictment, making rulings that defied the separation of powers.”
And Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in the federal courts, said in a text message: “Especially in a case like this, where the trial court dismissed the suit and the government is appealing, it’s unheard-of for the trial court to still claim the power to block specific government action — all the more so when at least some of that action is entirely unrelated to that case.”
The scramble by Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his co-defendants to stop the report’s release began on Monday, when they started a multipronged effort to block it from coming out. The lawyers called the report “one-sided” and described it as part of a “politically motivated attack” against the president-elect.
Mr. Trump’s legal team wrote a letter to Mr. Garland asking him not to release the report after Mr. Smith filed the final version to him. In a separate move, lawyers for Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira went directly to Judge Cannon, of the Southern District of Florida, asking for an emergency order blocking the release even though the case was not before her anymore.
The maneuvering continued on Tuesday, as Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira filed a substantially similar request before the 11th Circuit, asking it to block the release of the report. Mr. Trump sought to join their motion in front of Judge Cannon.
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Special counsels are outside prosecutors that an attorney general can appoint to handle politically sensitive cases with a degree of day-to-day autonomy when they decide that doing so would be in the public interest or would avoid any perception of a conflict of interest.
Under a Justice Department regulation, at the conclusion of their work, special counsels are to provide a report to the attorney general explaining why they chose to bring the charges they did and why they declined to bring other charges they may have been considering.
The regulation was written in the late 1990s after the high-profile release of a lurid report by Kenneth Starr, an independent counsel who investigated Mr. Clinton over the Whitewater land deal and his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The idea was that the report to the attorney general was to at least initially be “confidential,” as the regulation says. But the attorney general has the power to make it public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/us/politics/trump-documents-case-jack-smith-report.html