A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked the report from being released.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland plans to publicly release part of Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report on the federal election interference case against Donald Trump, according to a court filing Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Elaine Cannon, who dismissed Trump's lawsuit over the secret documents, temporarily blocked the release of Smith's final report on Tuesday to prevent "irreparable harm" while the case is considered by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
In Wednesday’s filing, prosecutors argued that Garland has inherent authority to release the report, and they asked the 11th Circuit to vacate Judge Cannon’s order and deny a request by Trump’s former co-defendants aide Walt Nota and staffer Carlos de Oliveira, to block the release of the report.
Prosecutors argued that because Smith had already forwarded his report to Garland, the argument made by Trumps former co-defendants about the legitimacy of Smith’s appointment is inconsistent.
The attorney general is the Senate-confirmed head of the Justice Department and has the authority to oversee all officers and employees of the department. As such, the attorney general has the authority to decide whether to release investigative reports prepared by his subordinates,” the filing said.
This authority is inherent in the Attorney General’s office; it does not depend on the legality of the appointment of a special counsel to act as an inferior officer of the United States or on the specific departmental regulations that require the Attorney General to authorize the public release of special counsel reports the prosecutors argued.
While defense attorneys had sought to block the release of Volume Two of the report related to the classified documents case — not Volume One, which covers Trump’s election interference case — Judge Cannon’s order referred only to the “final report,” and not to the two volumes within, suggesting that the entire report was blocked from release.
The prosecutors asked the appeals court to make clear that there is no bar to the Attorney General’s granting the limited congressional review of Volume Two as described above and to the public release of Volume One.
According to the filing, Garland does not intend to publicly release the report on the classified documents case at this point, although the volume will be available to ranking members and chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. The filing makes clear that Garland’s decision not to release the volume of the report covering the classified documents investigation was recommended by Smith himself when it was forwarded to Garland on Tuesday evening.
Defendants Nota and de Oliveira have no cognizable interest in this volume of the final report, however, nor any cognizable Article III theory that would justify asking this court to grant relief with respect to it. Nor is there any legal basis for any other interested party to seek to block the release of Volume One the prosecutors argued.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 criminal counts related to handling classified materials in June 2023, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information ranging from U.S. nuclear secrets to the country’s defense capabilities and took steps to thwart them. Government efforts to return documents
The former president, along with Nota and de Oliveira, pleaded not guilty to an additional charge of attempting to delete surveillance footage allegedly taken at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Smith has been dropping his cases against the former president since Trump was re-elected in November, due to a long-standing Justice Department policy that bars prosecutions of a sitting president.
