Yale Law School Joins Effort To Force Judge Cannon To Release Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago Report Against Trump

The filing of a brief by a well-funded institute at Yale Law School to force the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his Mar-a-Lago case against President Trump is an escalation against the 47th president by a liberal bastion of the Ivy League. The brief’s author — the Yale Law’s Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression — is not a party to the ongoing litigation over the report, which has now stretched for more than a year. The clinic, though, has intervened as an amicus curiae, meaning a non-party that claims a stake in the outcome. Their brief is now docketed at the 11th United States Appeals Circuit, which will in June hear oral arguments on the fate of the report. Yale Law School, often reckoned the most elite law school in the country, is a citadel of the legal left and houses several law clinics, programs and institutes. Among these operations is the Abrams Institute, which in its amicus brief aims to bolster the side being argued by two other liberal groups, American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The groups — and now Yale — argue that the public possesses a First Amendment right to know the contents of Mr. Smith’s summation of his documents case against Mr. Trump, which was reckoned by some to be the strongest of the four criminal ones levied against the president.Mr. Smith charged Mr. Trump in June 2023 with multiple felonies regarding his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago during the interregnum. This followed an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago before Mr. Smith’s appointment. Ultimately, the case was dismissed when Mr. Trump was reelected. Nevertheless, Mr. Smith still finished his report, which is expected to amount to an unflattering portrayal of Mr. Trump.Lillian Goldman law library, Yale Law School. Nick Allen via Wikimedia CommonsJudge Cannon has so far rejected the First Amendment arguments from Columbia and American Oversight. Mr. Trump appointed her to the federal bench in 2020, and she presided over the documents case from its inception. She came to rule that Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Judge Cannon not only disqualified Mr. Smith but also dismissed all charges against Mr. Trump and his two co-defendants — the valet Waltine Nauta and the Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira.Judge Cannon’s ruling permanently blocking the report’s release accuses Mr. Smith of a “brazen stratagem” — working on the dispatch even after he had been barred from the case. That, she ruled, amounted to “a concerning breach of the spirit” of her dismissal of the case, “if not an outright violation of it.” She adds that the report’s release would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice” and amount to a “manifest injustice.”A three judge panel of the 11th Circuit has already rejected a request from the Knight Institute and American Oversight to issue a writ of mandamus, an “extraordinary” remedy where a higher court commands a lower one to act, usually in circumstances where the appellate tribunal determines that an abuse of discretion has occurred. The panel, though, prohibited Judge Cannon from destroying the report. That preserves the possibility of appeal.Destruction —or what the defendants call “constitutional expungement” — was the preferred course of not only Mr. Trump but also of Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice, who intervened to recommend that Mr. Smith’s handiwork be “consigned to the dustbin of history.” Now, though, Yale enters the fray to argue that Mr. Smith’s “final report is a judicial record subject to the common-law right of access.”Yale argues that “every pillar of the district court’s” — that’s Judge Cannon — “contrary conclusion is legal error foreclosed by binding precedent.” The 11th Circuit has held that the common law “establishes a general presumption that criminal and civil actions should be conducted publicly” because access to “judicial proceedings is an essential component of our system of justice and instrumental in securing the integrity of the process.”The brief accuses Judge Cannon of taking “on the role of gatekeeper” and interposing herself “between the executive branch and the public, overriding the Attorney General’s discretion to release the Special Counsel report.” Judge Cannon’s position, though, is that the due process rights of the defendants, which amount to constitutional bedrock, override the special counsel regulations, which are mere guidance, not even law.Yale asks the 11th Circuit to rule that Judge Cannon’s intervention amounted to “an exercise of judicial power that the public has both an interest and a duty to oversee.” The brief argues that this case is “the beating center” of the public’s right to know the “operations of the courts and the judicial conduct of judges—matters of utmost public concern.” Judge Cannon could find no precedent where a report was released after defendants were charged but not tried.Yale’s language mirrors the one issued by the Knight Institute in a statement when they first intervened in this case — that “the public has an extraordinary interest in the report, which concerns allegations of grave criminal conduct by the nation’s highest-ranking official. Its release would shed light on the scope and integrity of the Special Counsel’s investigation and on the character and actions of President Trump.”Yale is not alone in trying to sway the 11th Circuit. Another amicus brief comes from America First Legal, a conservative law firm founded by a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, Stephen Miller. America First argues in favor of the report’s destruction, and declares in a statement that “the Special Counsel operation was unlawful from the outset, and federal law grants the Department of Justice broad authority to dispose of records that are unnecessary.”

Yale Law School Joins Effort To Force Judge Cannon To Release Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago Report Against Trump

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