This article was updated on January 7 at 10:27 a.m. PT.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on President-elect Donald Trump.
“Pending resolution of the Emergency Motion filed in the Eleventh Circuit and/or any further direction from the Eleventh Circuit, Attorney General Garland, the Department of Justice, Special Counsel Smith, all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals, are TEMPORARILY ENJOINED from (a) releasing, sharing, or transmitting the Final Report or any drafts of such Report outside the Department of Justice, or (b) otherwise releasing, distributing, conveying, or sharing with anyone outside the Department of Justice any information or conclusions in the Final Report or in drafts thereof,” the order said.
The move comes as Trump co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira asked Cannon to block the release of Smith’s report. The report, centering on the classified documents case, accused Trump of keeping classified materials after leaving office.
Nauta and De Oliveira argued that the release of the report “would directly infringe on Nauta’s and De Oliveira’s Fifth Amendment due process rights, taking on the status of a public form of an invalid new indictment, replete with unfairly prejudicial assertions of alleged offenses going well beyond any assertions in the indictment and other public filings.”
Trump’s attorneys told Attorney General Merrick Garland that upon reviewing a draft version of Smith’s report, they believed it would violate “fundamental norms regarding the presumption of innocence, including with respect to third parties unnecessarily impugned by Smith’s false claims.”
“Because Smith has proposed an unlawful course of action, you must countermand his plan and remove him promptly,” the letter said.
Smith’s team wrote Monday evening in response to Nauta and De Oliveira that Garland “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, but the Department can commit that the Attorney General will not release that volume to the public, if he does at all, before Friday, January 10, 2025, at 10:00 a.m.”
