U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has blocked the release of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
According to Cannon, releasing the report “would cause irreparable damage to former defendants from disclosure of non-public discovery material implicating still-contested grand jury and privilege concerns; and it would contravene basic notions of fairness and justice in the process, where no adjudication of guilt has been reached following initiation of criminal charges.”
“There is the matter of manifest injustice to the former defendants that would result from disclosure of Volume II,” she wrote. “Special Counsel Smith, acting without lawful authority, obtained an indictment in this action and initiated proceedings that resulted in a final order of dismissal of all charges. As a result, the former defendants in this case, like any other defendant in this situation, still enjoy the presumption of innocence held sacrosanct in our constitutional order.”
Discussing Smith’s action after he was found by the court to be unlawfully appointing, Cannon condemned that he and his team “chose to circumvent it, for months, by taking the discovery generated in this case and compiling it in a final report for transmission to then-Attorney General Garland, to Congress, and then beyond.”
Cannon further explained that the court “strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt, at least not in a situation like this one, where the defendants contested the charges from the outset and still proclaim their innocence.” She noted that it is “certainly not customary for a prosecutor, who obtains an indictment and initiates a criminal prosecution that is later dismissed in a final order without an adjudication of guilt, to publicly disseminate large swaths of discovery generated in the case—much less after directing defense counsel to destroy the discovery as a condition of reviewing the report he insisted on producing despite a court order declaring his appointment unlawful.”
In his recently released deposition, Smith stood behind his prosecution of President Trump, declaring that his team “developed powerful evidence” against him.
