The Justice Department said Wednesday that it plans to release special counsel Jack Smith's findings in Donald Trump's efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election but will keep under wraps for now the rest of the report focused on Trump's hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, the Associated Press reports. The DOJ plan emerged in an appeals court filing after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida temporarily blocked the department from releasing the report. The order, a few days before Smith’s office is expected to shut down, scrambles the final stage of his work, reports Politico. Smith is expected to give Attorney General Merrick Garland a report laying out the results of his probes into Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 and his attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Cannon’s order, issued at the request of two Trump co-defendants in the documents case, bars DOJ from releasing the report until three days after a federal appeals court rules on the issue.
Cannon’s order does not apply to Trump or his co-defendants, even though Smith contends they inappropriately revealed aspects of the report in a Monday court filing. In that filing, Trump said Smith described him as “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort,” as “the head of the criminal conspiracies” and said he harbored a “criminal design.” Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed Smith's prosecution last July after concluding that Garland’s appointment of Smith was illegal. The Justice Department appealed that ruling, but dropped the part of the appeal pertaining to Trump after he won the election. This week, Trump said that Smith "wanted to do a report just before I took office, probably. It’ll be like a fake report, just like the investigation was a fake investigation … Why should he be allowed to write a fake report?" Trump praised Cannon' ruling tossing the case, saying she “was brilliant and tough and she didn’t stand for it.”
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