The Justice Department has taken a decisive stance against public release of the investigative report authored by former special counsel Jack Smith concerning President Donald Trump’s retention of classified materials and alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results. In a forceful court submission on Friday, Department prosecutors argued that the report constitutes an "illicit product of an unlawful investigation" and should be consigned to "the dustbin of history," advocating for it to remain sealed and inaccessible to the public.
This position aligns closely with arguments put forth by Trump and his legal team, who recently petitioned U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to impose a permanent injunction preventing the disclosure of the Smith report. Such legal maneuvers increase the probability that the detailed account of inquiries into Trump’s conduct—previously perceived as a serious potential threat to his political and legal standing—will stay out of public view.
Jack Smith and his investigative team compiled this two-part report to document their examinations of two key inquiries: Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome after Joe Biden's victory, and the possession of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence after the conclusion of his first presidential term.
Both inquiries produced indictments, which subsequently were dropped following Trump’s November 2024 election triumph, in accordance with long-standing Department of Justice guidelines that federal prosecutors should not pursue criminal charges against a sitting president.
The electoral investigation volume was made available during the closing days of the Biden administration. However, Judge Cannon, appointed by Trump and having issued multiple rulings favorable to Trump and his co-defendants in the classified documents case, granted a temporary halt on releasing the segment of the report related to that particular case. This judicial stay meant that Smith was barred from discussing the substance of this inquiry during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday.
The existing injunction is scheduled to expire on February 24. Nonetheless, Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida—the jurisdiction where the classified documents case was filed—expressed in a three-page filing that the report should remain under seal. Alongside fellow prosecutor Manolo Reboso, Quiñones stated that Smith’s investigation was "unlawful from its inception". Moreover, they cited Attorney General Pam Bondi’s classification of the report as "an internal deliberative communication that is privileged and confidential and should not be released" outside official Justice Department boundaries.
In their filing, the prosecutors contended that "Smith not only weaponized the Department of Justice against a leading presidential candidate in pursuit of an anti-democratic end, but he did so without legal authority and while targeting constitutionally protected activity."
Conversely, during his recent testimony before Congress, Smith defended the integrity of his investigations, affirming he operated with no partisan bias and stood by the criminal charges he pursued against Trump. "No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did," Smith asserted regarding the former president.