Left: Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida). Right: Special counsel Jack Smith (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
After multiple reminders failed to move U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to consider releasing former special counsel Jack Smith”s full report on the Mar-a-Lago investigation of President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, a nonprofit group has asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to force Cannon’s hand, which the appellate court has done before.
The Knight First Amendment Institute argued Tuesday that the situation requires extraordinary relief, in the form of a writ of mandamus, compelling Cannon to rule on motions to intervene she’s been sitting on for roughly half a year.
“Mandamus relief is warranted here because the district court’s six-month delay in ruling on the Institute’s motion to intervene is manifestly unreasonable,” the filing began. “It is well-established that the common law and constitutional right of access to judicial records encompasses a right to prompt adjudication of access motions, in recognition of the fact that the postponement of disclosure undermines the benefit of public scrutiny and may have the same result as complete suppression. The district court’s failure to address the Institute’s access claims has already compromised the Institute’s rights, and each passing day constitutes an additional abridgement.”
As Law&Crime has reported, the Knight Institute and nonprofit watchdog American Oversight both filed motions to intervene in the months following Trump’s inauguration, asking the Trump-appointed jurist, who threw out the president’s case and invalidated Smith’s appointment as special counsel, to lift an injunction blocking the release of Smith’s Mar-a-Lago report. When Cannon initially issued the injunction in January, she noted that Trump valet Waltine Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos de Oliveira still had an active appeal at the 11th Circuit and that, as a result, releasing Volume II publicly would jeopardize their “due process rights to a fair trial[.]”
After Trump was in office again, the DOJ dismissed the cases against the president’s erstwhile co-defendants Nauta and de Oliveira, leading the two nonprofits to push for the report’s release. Despite the groups’ motions to intervene and despite their separate reminders for Cannon to issue a ruling, given that the Nauta and de Oliveira cases are over, no ruling has come.
As recently as early September, a federal judge in New York handed the New York Times a loss in the newspaper’s efforts to bring Volume II of Smith’s report public through Freedom of Information Act litigation. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods noted that the “motions to intervene remain pending before Judge Cannon,” and he declined to second-guess whether the judge had jurisdiction issue her injunction. Woods found instead that the DOJ was “not improperly withholding Volume II of the Special Counsel’s report.”
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The Knight Institute has now asked the 11th Circuit to force Cannon to rule, so the group can at least appeal a denial — if there is one — on an expedited basis.
“[T]he public interest in the disclosure of the report became weightier when then-former President Trump was re-elected—and, even more importantly, the fair-trial interests that once overcame the First Amendment right of access evaporated when this Court dismissed the criminal case against Nauta and De Oliveira on February 11, 2025,” the petition said. “At this point there is no significant likelihood that Nauta and De Oliveira will face trial. Again, this Court dismissed the case against them on February 11, 2025, on DOJ’s motion, and DOJ subsequently represented to the district court that it does not intend to revive the charges against them. If there is any risk at all that Nauta and De Oliveira will face trial, the risk is remote at best. Nor is there any significant risk that the release of Volume II will compromise their legitimate interests in other ways.”
Knight Institute executive director Jameel Jaffer, alleging that Cannon has “continued suppression” of the report for “no legitimate reason,” added in a statement that the 11th Circuit must act in the public’s interest.
“This report is of singular importance to the public because it addresses allegations of grave criminal conduct by the nation’s highest-ranking official,” Jaffer said. “There is no legitimate reason for the report’s continued suppression, and it should be posted on the court’s public docket without further delay.”
