Merrick Garland Tells Trump to Screw Off on Jack Smith Report
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Wednesday that he will release some of the details from special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s criminal cases, but not all of them.
In a filing, Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the final memo on Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report, while handing the controversial details of Trump’s classified documents case to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
The decision immediately flouts an order from Judge Aileen Cannon, who caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants Tuesday. She ruled that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect. But the joint request to block the release of the 2020 election report, which names neither of the co-defendants, is little more than a reach, according to Garland.
“Defendants [Walt] Nauta and [Carlos] De Oliveira have no cognizable interest in that volume of the Final Report, however, nor any plausible theory of Article III standing that would justify their asking this Court to grant relief with respect to it,” Garland wrote in Wednesday’s filing. “Nor would there be any legal basis for any other interested party to seek to block release of Volume One.”
Garland’s notes on Trump’s classified documents case are doubly strategic. By restricting the release of volume two of Smith’s report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Garland undermined the “essential premise” of Nauta and De Oliveira’s emergency motion, which claimed that the immediate public release of the report would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”
Garland “determined that he will not make a public release of Volume Two while defendants’ cases remain pending,” the filing reads. “That should be the end of the matter.”
Cannon’s Tuesday ruling stated that Garland, the DOJ, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.
It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.
This story has been updated.