U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted a request from Donald Trump’s former co-defendants to stop the Justice Department from sharing special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents report with members of Congress.
“In short, the Department offers no valid justification for the purportedly urgent desire to release to members of Congress case information in an ongoing criminal proceeding,” Cannon, a Trump appointee, wrote in an order published Tuesday, the day after Trump returned to office. Cannon dismissed the classified documents case in July.
Of course, whether the case is ongoing for much longer very much remains to be seen. The DOJ had appealed Cannon’s dismissal and then withdrew the appeal as to Trump after he won the election. It’s still pending as to his former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, but the DOJ now under Trump can fully withdraw the appeal and he can pardon them.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland previously agreed not to publicly release the documents volume of Smith’s final report while the case was still pending against Nauta and De Oliveira. The report’s federal election interference case volume was already publicly released under Garland.
Unsuccessfully opposing the defense motion, DOJ lawyers argued that Nauta and De Oliveira couldn’t show that confidentially sharing the volume with the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees would cause the defendants any harm. The DOJ further argued that Cannon lacked authority to intrude on the department’s dealings with Congress.
In her order, Cannon wrote that a court “has an affirmative duty, triggered at the inception of a criminal proceeding, to safeguard the due process rights of the accused.” That duty includes “taking protective measures to ensure a fair trial and to minimize the effects of prejudicial pretrial publicity,” she wrote. “Given the very strong public interest in this criminal proceeding and the absence of any enforceable limits on the proposed disclosure, there is certainly a reasonable likelihood that review by members of Congress as proposed will result in public dissemination of all or part” of the documents volume, the judge wrote.
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