A jurist appointed by President Donald Trump to protect him, Florida’s Judge Aileen Cannon, has been described as a “partisan hack” and blasted by House Democrats. Now she is facing a new challenge: Calls to release a report by former special counsel Jack Smith that she has worked to suppress.
“A public advocacy group is urging a federal court of appeals to use any means available and necessary to unseal the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith's final report on his criminal investigations into President Donald Trump,” wrote Law and Crime's Colin Kalmbacher on Tuesday. “Late last year, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, issued two orders related to the long-running dispute over the second volume.”
Kalmbacher added, “In the first order, Cannon denied efforts to intervene by the Knight First Amendment Institute and transparency-focused nonprofit American Oversight. In her second order, Cannon acknowledged ‘any former or current party’ may move ‘for leave to intervene.’”
While Trump has previously praised Cannon for doing everything in her power to keep Smith’s report from coming to light, the American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute argue that there is a public interest in knowing their contents. They are citing the Freedom of Information Act as proof that Cannon must disclose the report’s contents.
"Appellees urge this Court to bar American Oversight's intervention in the district court based on a fundamental misunderstanding of American Oversight's interest as a prospective intervenor," their brief argued. "Because it had no other recourse to vindicate its rights under FOIA, Appellant sought intervention in the below proceedings—which were governed by federal criminal statutes."
It added, “American Oversight's statutory rights do not govern the underlying criminal proceedings, nor has it asserted any interest related to ‘the prosecution or nonprosecution’ of the former defendants. American Oversight's interest is more akin to that of media organizations that seek and are granted intervention in criminal cases for access to judicial records… FOIA does not govern the underlying criminal proceedings but provides American Oversight with a federal right, implicated by the district court's order barring the release of Volume II, to seek non-exempt public records from the federal government.”
The Trump administration has taken a special interest in keeping Smith’s report under wraps. In May they went after Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, the former managing assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District, for allegedly trying to email the documents to her personal account.
“The defendant concealed her actions by saving electronic copies of the government records in question under the misleading files names ‘chocolate cake recipe’ and ‘bundt cake recipe’ before electronically transmitting those records to her personal email accounts,” Trump’s Justice Department alleged in May. “As to the DOJ report, the indictment further alleges the defendant acted knowing that her transmission of the record outside DOJ directly violated the court order and impaired the proper administration of the underlying criminal prosecution.