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What Aileen Cannon Is Trying to Do With Jack Smith’s Trump Report Is Actually Lawless

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08.01.2025
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Over the past few years, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has issued some wildly indefensible decisions in favor of Donald Trump, the president who appointed her. She singlehandedly stymied the investigation into the president-elect’s theft of classified documents, and effectively abetted his obstruction of the Justice Department’s probe into that alleged crime. And yet these past interventions are still arguably less galling than Cannon’s latest salvo: a brief order, issued on Tuesday, blocking the Justice Department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith’s two-volume report on his investigation into Trump. Her order is fundamentally lawless—not even in a debatable sense, but objectively just outside the law. Cannon literally has no authority to impose this injunction, and has not bothered to explain why she thinks she does. It is a fitting finale to her ignominious reign over the prosecution that she ruthlessly suppressed.

This final battle in U.S. v. Trump is especially perverse because the president-elect has already evaded Smith’s charges by winning reelection. Having gotten away with the alleged crimes in question, he now demands even more: to conceal the details of Smith’s investigation from the American people. Here’s how the process would normally go, under Justice Department regulations: The special counsel compiles a report explaining his prosecutorial decisions, and the attorney general decides whether to release it to the public. Smith is currently finalizing his two-volume report; one volume focuses on the election subversion case handled by a federal judge in D.C., while the other details the classified documents case overseen by Cannon. Attorney General Merrick Garland intends to release a portion of his work before Jan. 20.

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Trump is, understandably, eager to quash the entire report. But he won’t be president again for nearly two weeks, so he enlisted his favorite judge for one last assist. The president-elect urged Cannon to bar the report’s........

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