Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Jack Smith’s Last-Ditch Attempt to Damage Trump

Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday temporarily blocked special counsel Jack Smith from releasing his final report regarding his criminal investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.

“Trump co-defendants Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira filed an emergency motion to block the reported imminent release of Smith’s final report,” Fox News reported.

The report is expected to cover Smith’s prosecutions of Trump concerning his alleged mishandling of classified documents, which the special counsel’s office brought in Florida, and Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election, which Smith filed in Washington, D.C.

Cannon — who dismissed the classified documents case in July — said in her Tuesday order she was blocking the report from being released “to prevent irreparable harm arising from the circumstances as described in the current record in this emergency posture, and to permit an orderly and deliberative sequence of events.”

Judge Aileen Cannon has just entered an order TEMPORARILY BLOCKING Special Counsel, Jack Smith, from releasing his Final Report. She says she wants to wait to see what the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals does with Nauta and De Oliveira’s emergency motion they filed this morning. pic.twitter.com/IYNtaxjFTX

— Amy Perkins (@adhesive_piece_) January 7, 2025

The judge’s order specified that the report must not be made public until three days after the resolution of an emergency appeal that Nauta and Oliveira made to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to block the release of the report, according to Fox News.

ABC News reported, “The special counsel’s office assured Judge Cannon in their filing that Smith would not release that specific volume of the report [regarding the classified documents case] anytime before 10 a.m. Friday and that they would submit a fuller response to Nauta and DeOliveira’s emergency motion no later than 7 p.m. Tuesday evening.”

ABC added that Trump’s attorneys also sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling for Smith to be immediately removed from his position as special counsel and that any decision to release his report be deferred until after Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, takes office.

“No report should be prepared or released, and Smith should be removed, including for even suggesting that course of action given his obvious political motivations and desire to lawlessly undermine the transition,” attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote.

Trump pleaded not guilty in July 2023 to 37 counts of mishandling classified materials.

He, Nauta, and De Oliveira also pleaded not guilty to a superseding indictment alleging the three had attempted to delete surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Smith’s team withdrew last week from the Justice Department’s appeal to the 11th Circuit of the classified documents case against Nauta and De Oliveira.

Last month, Smith formally dropped charges against Trump in both the classified documents case and the 2020 election interference case.

Smith cited the long-standing DOJ policy that sitting presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted.

In an unusual move in October, Smith filed a 165-page brief containing “evidence” he planned to present if the election interference case ever went to trial.

“Trump’s team objected, and the judge acknowledged that Smith’s request to file first was ‘procedurally irregular’ — moments before she ruled in Smith’s favor, as she’s done at virtually every consequential turn,” CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig noted in a piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, titled “Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot.”

So the filing became public just before November’s election.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy agreed with Honig, writing in a piece for National Review, “This is not a legal exercise, it’s a political one.”

He wrote, “A prosecutor’s case, like a football team’s game plan, never looks better than it does on paper, before it experiences first contact with the opposing team.”

McCarthy explained that evidence is not really evidence that matters until it goes through the proper legal process. “As a rule, we don’t get to see all the evidence until the trial begins. That’s intentional: It ensures that evidence is presented under controlled circumstances.

“The judge instructs the jury from the outset that the allegations are proof of nothing; that the defendant is presumed innocent; that the prosecutor bears the burden of proving the case in the courtroom, not on paper; that the defense has a right to object to testimony and documents, and therefore such evidence is irrelevant until the court has ruled on those objections; and that the only thing that matters is the jury’s assessment of the testimony and other evidence as they are admitted in the courtroom,” the former prosecutor wrote.

Smith’s final report likely will include all he deems as evidence against Trump, without the protections the defendant would have in a courtroom.

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