(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is urging the federal judge who dismissed his criminal indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents to continue blocking the public release of former special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigation, according to a court filing Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who dismissed Trump’s indictment on the eve of the 2024 Republican National Convention on the grounds that Smith’s appointment as a special counsel was unlawful, had previously granted a last-ditch request from from lawyers for Trump’s co-defendants to block the Biden Justice Department from making public the volume of Smith’s report that detailed Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Two separate watchdog groups had filed legal challenges requesting that Cannon lift her order, and last month an appeals court panel urged Cannon to issue some kind of ruling on the requests after months of silence.
In Tuesday’s filing, an attorney representing Trump in his private capacity urged Judge Cannon to extend her order delaying the Smith report’s release, arguing it would “perpetuate Jack Smith’s unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”
It’s not immediately clear when Cannon might issue her ruling on the requests, though the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave her a 60-day deadline on Nov. 3 to issue her response to the requests from American Oversight and Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute.
Trump pleaded not guilty in June 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House in 2021, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information and took steps to thwart the Biden Justice Department’s efforts to get the documents back.
Top political appointees at the Justice Department, including Trump’s former defense attorney-turned-deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, have previously said they would oppose making that volume of Smith’s final report public.
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