A federal appeals court has criticized U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon for her months-long delay in addressing requests to lift her order blocking the disclosure of the second volume of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on President Donald Trump’s handling of classified information.
In a brief, unsigned ruling on Monday, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that two liberal-leaning advocacy groups—American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University—had “established undue delay” by Judge Cannon. The groups filed motions in February seeking the release of the report section concerning the probe into Trump’s alleged illegal retention of classified material and obstruction.
Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, had initially barred the disclosure in January, finding that its public release risked “substantially impairing” the rights of Trump’s co-defendants, though the Justice Department later dropped charges against them and the special counsel’s office ceased prosecution of Trump after his re-election.
The appeals panel has given Judge Cannon 60 days to act on the outstanding motions before the 11th Circuit will rule on whether to lift her earlier order.
The fight over this second volume of the Smith report remains one of the last unresolved elements of the special counsel’s defunct criminal cases against Trump. The first section of the report, related to the election conspiracy case, was released by the Justice Department shortly before Trump returned to the White House.
The advocacy groups are pressing for the report’s release under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), arguing that Cannon’s order is no longer justified given the public interest and the end of the related criminal prosecutions.
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