Judge Aileen Cannon isn’t done blocking and tackling for Donald Trump—especially blocking.
In a brief order today, the federal judge in Florida temporarily barred the Justice Department from releasing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report of his investigation into the president-elect. The order, which came after a request from Trump’s co-defendants, not only prevents the public release of the report but also bans DOJ from sharing it with other areas of the government. (Trump’s lawyers separately asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to block the report’s release.)
Cannon, a Trump appointee, was randomly assigned one of Smith’s cases in June 2023—the one involving Trump’s hoarding of highly classified materials at Mar-a-Lago. Her handling of it puzzled and appalled many observers, some of whom accused her of “sabotaging” the case. In July, she threw the case out, concluding that Smith’s appointment altogether was unconstitutional. DOJ appealed her ruling, but Smith moved to dismiss the matter after Trump won the presidential election.
[David A. Graham: Aileen Cannon is who critics feared she was]
The dismissal was a bow to reality—DOJ guidance bars the prosecution of a sitting president, and Trump had vowed to dismiss it and fire Smith anyway—but it also paved the way for Smith to release a report laying out his findings before Trump could take charge and bury it. Cannon’s ruling appears to try to block the release of information related not only to the classified-documents case but also to a separate case involving Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election, which was in federal court in Washington, D.C. Smith moved to dismiss that case after Trump’s victory as well.
Cannon’s ruling is temporary and expires once the Eleventh Circuit Court, which was hearing DOJ’s appeal, rules. From one perspective, Cannon’s ruling is reasonable: She’s just preserving the status quo while the higher court decides. But analyzing her choice outside of her repeated decisions that help Trump is impossible. Her ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional conflicted with years of rulings about special counsels, and surprised legal observers who’d expected Trump’s argument to be quickly dismissed.
And that was after her already dilatory handling of the case, which allowed Trump to escape a trial in what was arguably the most straightforward of the several criminal cases against him. Trump clearly took the documents, some of which involved the nation’s most sensitive secrets. They were recovered at Mar-a-Lago by FBI agents, who found them stacked haphazardly in a bathroom and on a ballroom stage, even though the government had issued Trump a subpoena. But by drawing the case out and winning the election in November, Trump managed to quash it.
Now he’d like to bury any damaging information that Smith gathered—in both this and the election case. The release of a report is standard for special counsels, but Trump is once again trying to run out the clock. If he can drag the process out until January 20, when he becomes president, he may be able to permanently block any release. With any other judge, that might seem like a pipe dream. But luckily for Trump, Aileen Cannon isn’t any other judge.
