Columbia’s Liberal Knight Institute Escalates Push To Publish Jack Smith’s Secret Mar-a-Lago Report, Sun First To Report

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on Tuesday filed its latest brief urging that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago report be published, a move that comes despite repeated blocks to the group’s request for disclosure of the investigation put on hold The New York Sun is first to report that the brief to the 11th United States Court of Appeals comes a day after President Trump made his own filing arguing that oral arguments set for November 2 should be delayed until next year. The November date was set last week, earlier than some expected. The case comes before the 11th Circuit after Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida “permanently blocked” the release of Mr. Smith’s account of his Mar-a-Lago prosecution of Mr. Trump. The Knight Institute secured the hearing before the appellate court in February, when it appealed Judge Cannon’s ruling. The latest exchange of briefs covers the timing of oral arguments. The president’s lawyers write that a delay “is necessary to afford counsel for President Trump sufficient time to confer adequately with President Trump and complete the preparations for oral argument.” Knight, though, responds that Mr. Trump has “not shown good cause to delay argument.” The institute adds that Mr. Smith’s report is a “document of singular public importance that has been withheld from the public since January 2025.”The special counsel rules under which Mr. Smith labored — called the “Reno Regulations,” after the former attorney general for President Clinton — mandate that “at the conclusion of the special Counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.” The decision whether to release the report is assigned to the attorney general, who is empowered to decide if the “public release of these reports would be in the public interest.”Mr. Smith submitted two reports to Attorney General Merrick Garland — one for his prosecution of Mr. Trump for the retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and one for election interference in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Both of the cases were dismissed when Mr. Trump won reelection in 2024. Mr. Garland released the one pertaining to January 6 right away. In it, Mr. Smith contends that he would have convicted Mr. Trump “but for” the results of the election.The final report of the Mar-a-Lago case, though, has taken a more convoluted path to publication. One complication is that, unlike in the January 6 case, Mr. Trump was charged along with two co-defendants — the valet Waltine Nauta and the property manager Carlos de Oliveira. While Mr. Trump’s electoral victory granted him the overhang of criminal immunity, it did not do the same for his two employees and co-defendants.Even before Mr. Trump’s triumph over Vice President Harris, though, Mr. Smith’s case was on the ropes. Judge Cannon had dealt it a severe blow in the summer of 2024 when she ruled that Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed and dismissed the indictments he secured against all three defendants. Mr. Smith appealed that ruling to the 11th Circuit, a petition Mr. Trump immediately withdrew when he regained control of the Department of Justice.Even Mr. Garland was concerned enough about the murky status of the Mar-a-Lago case that he proposed releasing the potentially explosive report not to the general public but only to select lawmakers in camera, meaning secretly. Those safeguards, though, were not nearly enough for Judge Cannon, who ruled that any release of the report threatened the due process rights of Messrs. Nauta and de Oliveira, even after the charges were dropped.Judge Cannon, who is a 2020 appointee of Mr. Trump and who is sometimes mentioned as a dark horse candidate for the Supreme Court, accused Mr. Smith of a “brazen stratagem” to complete his report after he had been disqualified. Judge Cannon also ruled that the release would “cause irreparable damage to former defendants” and “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice.” She reasoned that never before had a report been released in a case where defendants were charged but never tried.Judge Cannon accused Mr. Smith of working to “effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order,” but she abjured the Justice Department’s request that the report suffer “constitutional expungement” — meaning total destruction. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi thundered in a brief that the document ought to be “confined to the dustbin of history.”Knight and another legal group, American Oversight, appealed Judge Cannon’s ruling to the 11th Circuit, which has reversed her before in the Mar-a-Lago case. That reversal came at an inchoate stage of the prosecution, immediately after the search of Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach mansion in the summer of 2022. Judge Cannon imposed a “special master” to supervise the government’s collection of evidence. The 11th Circuit determined that such supervision was unnecessary and unlawful. In May, a former federal prosecutor, Carmen Lineberger, was charged with emailing herself a copy of the report disguised as “Bundt Cake Recipe” and “Chocolate Cake Recipe.” She is not accused of having forwarded the document to anyone else. She has pleaded “not guilty.”

Columbia’s Liberal Knight Institute Escalates Push To Publish Jack Smith’s Secret Mar-a-Lago Report, Sun First To Report

Columbia’s Liberal Knight Institute Escalates Push To Publish Jack Smith’s Secret Mar-a-Lago Report, Sun First To Report

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