It’s official: The classified documents case is done. On Tuesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Trump Justice Department’s motion to dismiss its appeal against the remaining defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
To be sure, the case was effectively dead once Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had already dismissed the case against all three defendants last year, including Trump. The government was challenging the Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal on appeal when he won the election, which led the DOJ to withdraw the appeal as to Trump, due to federal policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Once Trump took office, it seemed like he would either pardon his former co-defendants or move to dismiss the appeal against them, and the Justice Department did the latter.
Notably, the dismissal removes the rationale cited by the DOJ under then-Attorney General Merrick Garland for keeping special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents report volume under wraps. That is, Joe Biden’s attorney general agreed not to release that volume so long as the case was technically still pending against Nauta and De Oliveira.
Given how Trump’s second term has started with an apparent lack of independence between him and the DOJ, it would be surprising if the dismissal led the department to voluntarily release a report likely containing negative information about the president. But the dismissal removes a reason that the DOJ previously cited in keeping it shelved. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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