A US federal judge permanently banned, this Monday, February 23, the release of a report by special prosecutor Jack Smith on the accumulation of confidential documents by the current president, Donald Trump, at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
District Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed to the position by Trump, accepted a request from the Republican president to keep the report secret. a criminal investigation that was, at one time, considered a significant legal risk for the current North American head of state.
Jack Smith and his team have written a two-volume report on the investigations into Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, and the retention of confidential documents at his property in Palm Beach, Florida, after leaving the White House at the end of his first term, in January 2021.
Both investigations resulted in charges that were dropped by Smith’s team after Trump’s presidential victory in November 2024, due to long-standing Justice Department legal opinions that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted at the federal level.
Aileen Cannon, who in 2024 dropped the case after concluding that Smith had been illegally appointed, maintained this Monday that the release of the report would represent a “manifest injustice” for Trump and his two co-defendants.
“Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, acting without legal authority, obtained an indictment in this case and initiated proceedings that resulted in a final order dismissing all charges.”wrote the judge.
“As a result, The former defendants in this case, like any other defendant in this situation, still enjoy the presumption of innocence held sacred in our constitutional order.”he added.
According to the federal judge, while it is true that, historically, special prosecutors released reports at the end of their work, they did so either after choosing not to bring charges in a specific case or “after an admission of guilt through a plea bargain or trial.”
“The Court does not find a situation in which a former special prosecutor released a report after initiating a criminal case that did not result in a conviction, at least not in a situation similar to thisin which the defendants contested the accusations from the beginning and still proclaim their innocence”, he concluded.
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