Columbia-Funded Legal Group Fights for Release of Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago Documents Report in Wake of University’s $221 Million Settlement With Trump

The Knight First Amendment Institute, an activist legal group funded by Columbia University, has already lost two legal attempts to force the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's report into President Donald Trump's handling of classified information. It's now hoping the third time will be the charm.

The Knight Institute, a self-styled defender of free speech that Columbia launched with $30 million in university funding in 2016, has filed multiple lawsuits against Trump and his administration over the last decade. Most recently, the group has focused on obtaining Smith's report on Trump's storage of documents from his presidency at Mar-a-Lago after his first term. The report, which is believed to be highly critical of Trump, is the final barb from Smith, whose criminal case in the matter was thrown out by a judge then dismissed when Trump won reelection.

The Knight Institute, partnering with a left-wing group called American Oversight, recently filed an appeal in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn District Judge Aileen Cannon's refusal to release the report. Cannon, who oversaw the Mar-a-Lago case, threw it out in mid-2024, ruling that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed.

Cannon went on to reject the Knight Institute's request in December to release Smith's report. Two months later, in February, she "permanently" blocked the report's release, arguing that it would be a "manifest injustice" to Trump and his codefendants to release a report on charges that had been dismissed. She denounced Smith's "brazen stratagem" of drafting a report of his investigation even after she had ordered the investigation unconstitutional and dismissed charges against Trump.

"Special Counsel Smith and his team went ahead for months, undeterred, preparing [the classified documents report] using discovery collected in connection with this proceeding and expending government funds in the process," Cannon wrote in the ruling. "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."

But the Knight Institute remains undeterred, despite Columbia having recently negotiated and then entered into a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration in July. The settlement addressed Columbia's failure to curtail anti-Semitism on campus but also required it to abandon its "diversity, equity and inclusion" programs and end racial preferences in hiring and admissions.

The Knight Institute, from within Columbia's walls, objected strenuously to the settlement, issuing a scathing statement that called it a disastrous surrender of Columbia's autonomy and an implicit endorsement of what the institute called the Trump administration's "outlandish" claims about DEI and the anti-Israel protests on campus.

The settlement allowed the restoration of hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants the federal government had pulled due to harassment of Jewish students. But the university continues to struggle. Its operating surplus fell to a recent low last year, and private gifts and grants fell 9 percent, to $589 million, from 2024, according to reports.

Columbia did not respond to a request for comment. The Knight Institute said its "goal is to vindicate the public's statutory, common law, and First Amendment rights of access to the Special Counsel's report on the classified documents case."

The Knight Institute was launched at Columbia in 2016 with $60 million in combined funding from Columbia and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funds liberal journalism projects. The Knight Institute has received millions of dollars in additional funding from left-wing philanthropies like George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, according to tax filings.

Columbia also administers the Pulitzer Prizes, the prestigious journalism awards that frequently favor reporting that advances liberal causes. Trump is suing the Pulitzer Board—which includes notable Trump foes such as New Yorker editor David Remnick and Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum—for upholding its 2018 award to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their reporting on Russia's role in the 2016 election. The Pulitzer Board has lost multiple efforts to get the judge to dismiss the case, which is now in the discovery phase in Florida.

Despite the settlement, Columbia continues to fund other institutes, centers, and legal clinics that advance left-leaning scholarship, policies, and activist goals, including organizations that focus on providing services to so-called marginalized ethnic groups. Other than providing basic funding for student groups like the College Republicans, the university is not believed to fund any conservative-leaning centers or institutes.

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