U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Monday to bar the release of former special counsel Jack Smith's report on the Mar-a-Lago documents case, finding that publication would inflict irreparable damage on President Trump and his former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
The ruling lands another blow to what remains of Smith's prosecutorial legacy. Cannon, who previously determined that Smith was unlawfully appointed and tossed the criminal case against Trump entirely, made clear in her order that the former defendants still enjoy the full presumption of innocence, The Hill reported.
"Special Counsel Smith, acting without lawful authority, obtained an indictment in this action and initiated proceedings that resulted in a final order of dismissal of all charges. As a result, the former defendants in this case, like any other defendant in this situation, still enjoy the presumption of innocence held sacrosanct in our constitutional order."
That framing matters. Cannon isn't merely blocking a document release. She's reasserting a constitutional principle that Smith's entire operation seemed designed to circumvent.
Cannon reserved some of her sharpest language for Smith's conduct after her original dismissal order. She described the special counsel's continued preparation of the report as a "brazen stratagem," noting that Smith and his team pressed forward for months using discovery collected during the proceedings and spending government funds in the process.
"To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it."
Consider the sequence. Cannon dismissed the case. Smith was appealing that dismissal. Then Trump won the election, and Smith moved to drop the charges against the president. The matter against Nauta and De Oliveira was swiftly dropped after Trump took office. All charges, gone.
And yet, during that entire stretch, Smith's team kept working on a report built from discovery materials gathered under an indictment that a federal judge had already ruled was obtained without lawful authority. The report on the January 6 case was released as Smith closed out his work, but the Mar-a-Lago volume was withheld, given the then-pending charges against Nauta and De Oliveira.
So the special counsel lost in court, saw every charge evaporate, and still tried to get the last word through a prosecutorial report that no defendant could challenge in a courtroom. Cannon's description of this as a "brazen stratagem" is, if anything, restrained.
This is the core of Cannon's reasoning, and it deserves more attention than the procedural headlines will give it. Smith brought charges. Those charges were dismissed. The defendants were never convicted of anything. Under American law, they are innocent.
Releasing a prosecutor's report that treats dismissed defendants as guilty in all but verdict isn't transparency. It's a workaround. It allows the government to impose reputational punishment without ever having to prove its case before a jury. Cannon recognized exactly what that would mean:
"There is the matter of manifest injustice to the former defendants that would result from disclosure of Volume II."
The case involved allegations that Trump retained roughly 300 documents with classified markings. Those are serious allegations. But serious allegations that never survive judicial scrutiny do not earn a consolation prize in the form of a public report. The system either works or it doesn't. You don't get to lose the case and then publish your closing argument anyway.
Cannon also blocked intervention by American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute, both of which sought to force the report's release. The Knight Institute has appealed her ruling.
Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute's executive director, argued in a release that the report has "no legitimate basis for its continued suppression." He invoked the First Amendment and the public's right of access to documents filed in connection with criminal trials:
"Given the significance of the Special Counsel's report, and the role it played in earlier proceedings before Judge Cannon, there is really no question that both the common law and the First Amendment require the report's release."
The argument sounds principled in the abstract. But it runs headlong into a basic problem: this isn't a case that produced a conviction, a plea, or even a standing indictment. It produced a dismissal. The First Amendment protects public access to court proceedings. It does not guarantee the public a right to read a prosecutor's internal work product from a case that collapsed.
If the standard is that any special counsel report must be published regardless of outcome, then every dismissed defendant in America should worry. The government could bring charges, fail to sustain them, and then release its investigative files to ensure the defendant is punished by public opinion instead. That's not transparency. That's an end run around due process.
Cannon's ruling did more than block a document. It reinforced a principle that the special counsel apparatus spent years trying to erode: that the process is not the punishment, and the prosecution does not get to substitute a press release for a verdict.
Her prior determination that Smith was unlawfully appointed, a decision that reversed 50 years of precedent regarding special counsel regulations, remains the foundation. Everything that flowed from that appointment, including this report, carries the same constitutional defect. Democrats and outside groups have pushed relentlessly for release, treating the report as a kind of moral verdict that doesn't require a courtroom. Cannon's answer is straightforward: that's not how American justice works.
Smith is gone. The charges are gone. The case is over. The report stays sealed because the Constitution still means what it says.