Final report into Trump's handling of classified documents should never be released: DOJ

Hours after President Donald Trump publicly praised the judge who oversaw his classified documents case, lawyers with the Department of Justice urged the U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to ensure the final report into Trump's alleged conduct never becomes public.

DOJ lawyers and attorneys representing Trump's former co-defendants argued that Judge Cannon should "under no circumstances" release the volume of Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report about the president's alleged retention of classified documents, alleging the report would violate the due process rights of Trump's top White House aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira.

Trump pleaded not guilty in June 2023 to 37 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information. Trump, along with Nauta and De Oliveira, also pleaded not guilty in a superseding indictment to allegedly attempting to delete surveillance footage at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

Judge Cannon dismissed the case last July, bucking decades of legal precedent by finding that Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed.

Friday's filing from the DOJ, addressing the prosecution of Nauta and De Oliveira, said, "They endured approximately a year-and-a-half of rampant pretrial publicity and vilification after their indictments were sought by an unconstitutionally appointed prosecutor with unconstitutionally limitless funding, who then went on to use the materials he collected in his unlawful investigation (at continued unconstitutional expense) to craft the Report intended to justify his actions."

"We had an amazing judge in Florida, Trump said at DOJ headquarters on Friday. "Actually, she was brilliant. She moved quickly. She was the absolute model of what a judge should be. She was strong and tough."

Last month, the White House said the FBI returned the boxes of materials that were seized from Mar-a-Lago to Trump.

Those boxes are now back at Mar-a-Lago and do not contain the classified documents that were originally in them when they were seized. Those sensitive documents are secured in the White House.

While Judge Cannon has expressed an unwillingness to publicly release the report, the parties in the case asked her to bar release of the report in case a future attorney general "ever expresses an intention to release Volume II outside the Department of Justice."

"The statute of limitations has not yet expired in this matter, and Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira respectfully request that the Court maintain its supervision over this exceptionally complex case and continue to enjoin the release of the Report, and that doing so would not be a usurpation of the Attorney General's authority to release or withhold the Report under DOJ's Special Counsel regulations," they wrote.