Main: An aerial view of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 31, 2022 (AP Photo/Steve Helber/File). Right inset: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida).
As President Donald Trump and the DOJ call for ex-special counsel Jack Smith's report on the Mar-a-Lago investigation to be relegated to the "dustbin of history," two groups are asking an appeals court to instead shed light on the probe's findings with a simple order.
American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University have each asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to step in and order U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to post a redacted copy of Volume II of Smith's report on her docket.
The first volume, relating to the Jan. 6 investigation, has been public since January 2025. The latter volume has never seen the outside of Cannon's chambers.
Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who threw out Trump's Espionage Act prosecution and ruled that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel, has for a calendar year kept Volume II of Smith's report out of public view. At first, the rationale behind the injunction was preventing "prejudice" to valet Waltine Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira Mar-a-Lago property manager, former Trump co-defendants who had active appeals.
But those appeals went away when the Trump administration dropped the cases, following Trump's inauguration, and so did the prospect that Nauta and de Oliveira will face charges in the future, according to the Knight Institute.
"There is also no risk that a future administration will revive the charges, because the five-year statute of limitations that applies to the charges will expire in 2028, before President Trump leaves office," one brief said. "It is thus disingenuous for Nauta and De Oliveira to represent that they remain in 'jeopardy' and that as a result 'their due process rights remain a serious concern that strongly outweighs any interest that the Government or the public might have in the release of the Special Counsel's Report.'"
While there isn't anything more than a "highly speculative" chance that Trump will face Espionage Act charges again after his second term in office expires, there also isn't a reason to block the public from reading about Smith's investigation in the absence of pending charges and before the statute of limitations has run, the parties argue.
After all, the brief said, the reports of special counsels Robert Mueller and Robert Hur were each released.
"Although the ten-year statute of limitations that applies to the Espionage Act charges against President Trump will not expire until 2033, whether a future administration would revive the charges is highly speculative. Furthermore, President Trump claims that presidential immunity protects him from the Espionage Act charges, because they 'stem directly from official acts by [him] while in office,'" the brief said. "It is also important to note that other Special Counsel reports were released to the public even though the individuals targeted faced the possibility that a future administration would bring charges against them within the applicable statute of limitations for the conduct alleged in the reports."
For that reason, the group stated Cannon's denial of the Knight Institute's attempt to intervene in the case for the purpose of lifting the injunction and securing the release of Volume II was "legally erroneous."
American Oversight likewise argued that the purpose of Cannon's original injunction, set to automatically expire on Feb. 24, "no longer exists."
Before the expiration date, Trump and his former co-defendants have each supported Cannon issuing an order which would "permanently" block the DOJ from releasing "so-called Special Counsel" Smith's "unlawfully prepared" report and destroy it.
"When American Oversight sought to intervene to have the district court's injunction order barring the release of the report dissolved, the district court denied intervention but provisionally dissolved the injunction effective February 24, 2026," the brief said. "However, the court's order expressly provided that the parties could challenge that relief. Not surprisingly, that is exactly what the former defendants have now done. Indeed, two have gone even further and sought to have the report destroyed so that the public will never have access to the Special Counsel's findings."
The 11th Circuit should not allow that to happen, the filing added.
"But both are relevant to determining the intervention issue because the nominally adverse party, the United States, is aligned with all three former defendants so that no party, absent intervention, will resist the effort to bury or destroy Volume II," the brief continued. "It is critical that American Oversight be permitted to intervene in the district court to vindicate its federal rights, and to assure that the facts and historical record will be preserved."
The groups have separately asked Cannon to stay proceedings until the 11th Circuit rules.
American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement that the group "will not allow the president and his guard dogs to bury information that belongs to the American people."
"For more than a year, Judge Cannon has kept the Special Counsel's final report under seal, long after any legitimate claims by Trump's co-conspirators expired," Chukwu said. "By blocking our effort to challenge her gag order, the court handed President Trump a roadmap for burying the report through delay and procedural gamesmanship."
Trump attorney Kendra Wharton recently dismissed the Knight Institute and American Oversight as "liberal organizations" and "purported" nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that have no right to obtain the "work product" of a prosecutor Cannon found to be illegally appointed.
Allowing the public to read Volume II, Wharton argued, would "improperly endorse and give legal effect to Smith's unlawful investigation and prosecution in the Southern District of Florida and would irreparably harm President Trump and his former co-defendants."
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