Main: Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a news conference with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., Friday, April 12, 2024, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee). Right inset: Aileen M. Cannon speaks remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight nomination hearing to be U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on July 29, 2020, in Washington (U.S. Senate via AP).
After ignoring, for months on end, the reminders from groups interested in shedding sunlight on ex-special counsel Jack Smith”s Mar-a-Lago report, the judge who tossed out the prosecution is letting President Donald Trump register his opposition, as he requested roughly two weeks ago.
The brief Sunday order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who remains on an 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals deadline to rule on two groups’ attempts to intervene for the purposes of lifting an injunction blocking the release of Volume II of Smith’s report, stated only that Trump’s motion to participate as a friend of the court or amicus curiae was granted.
“No additional filings are permitted by this Order,” Cannon added.
The order comes not long, relatively speaking, after Trump on Dec. 2 sought to back the efforts of his former classified documents case co-defendants, valet Waltine Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos de Oliveira, keeping Volume II of Smith’s report hidden.
That day, Trump requested “leave to participate in the proceedings as amicus curiae for the limited purpose of reaffirming and incorporating by reference his prior legal arguments to the Court, as well as those made by co-defendants Nauta and De Oliveira, that Volume II of Jack Smith’s Final Report should not be made public.”
“President Trump’s limited participation in the proceedings will not cause delay or prejudice any party, and this request is consistent with the Court’s prior decision to grant President Trump amicus status as to the January 21, 2025 Order,” the filing continued.
The Jan. 21 injunction Trump referred to has been a source of contention for nearly a year now.
When Cannon initially issued the injunction, she pointed out that Nauta and 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[.]” But a short time afterward, several months after Cannon already invalidated Smith’s appointment as special counsel and tossed the case against Trump, the Trump administration’s DOJ dismissed what was left of Nauta and de Oliveira’s case, ending their active appeals.
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In the aftermath, the Knight First Amendment Institute and American Oversight filed motions to intervene to lift the injunction, requests that have sat untouched since February. Nor was Cannon moved to rule on the motions after multiple July notifications on the docket that 90 days had passed.
The would-be intervenors, effectively stonewalled, responded in September by asking the 11th Circuit to step in and force Cannon to rule so there would at least be a decision, one way or the other, that could be appealed for the purposes of bringing Volume II public through litigation.
While the 11th Circuit didn’t go so far as to force Cannon, then and there, to rule, the appellate court did put in place a 60-day deadline starting in early November, finding American Oversight and the Knight Institute “established undue delay in resolution of their motions to intervene[.]”
Kicking off December, the DOJ, Nauta, and de Oliveira jointly submitted a status report voicing clear opposition to the release of Volume II, arguing there are still reasons for Cannon to keep the injunction in place.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason A. Reding Quiñones asserted that the “intervention is improper” and suggested Cannon toss out the groups’ motions to intervene without “reaching the merits” of their arguments for vacating the injunction.
Nauta and de Oliveira “would suffer” prejudice of an “extraordinary” nature, the filing added.
The DOJ referred to arguments made in a March status report, in which both the DOJ and the former defendants opposed lifting the injunction, with the Trump administration emphasizing that it’s up to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “discretion” to release the Mar-a-Lago report.
Nauta and de Oliveira went so far as to say Volume II “should be relegated to the dustbin of history, where it belongs, in order to prevent further unjust prejudice” following “approximately a year-and-a-half of rampant pretrial publicity and vilification after their indictments were sought by an unconstitutionally appointed prosecutor with unconstitutionally limitless funding[.]”
The DOJ said it “understands and appreciates” this stance and that the government “does not object to their positions that the January 21, 2025 Order should remain in effect.”
American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement that the group “strongly” opposes Trump’s “latest attempt to keep critical information — including matters that may implicate national security — from the American people.”
“The public has a right to see Special Counsel Jack Smith’s findings, and no amount of legal maneuvering by the President or Judge Cannon changes that. It shouldn’t take years to release a report about the President’s own handling of classified documents — especially while he demands full transparency from the very people he accuses of the same conduct,” Chukwu said. “It raises an obvious question: why keep information about himself buried that he insists must be exposed when it involves his political opponents? Every day this report stays hidden shields those in power and undermines accountability.”
