Judge faulted for lag in push for Jack Smith's Trump report

Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg News on Nov 3, 2025

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WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court found that a Florida judge was too slow in resolving months-old requests to lift her order blocking disclosure of a U.S. Justice Department report on President Donald Trump’s handling of classified information — and gave her 60 days to act.

In a brief, unsigned ruling on Monday, a three-judge panel said U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had yet to deal with motions filed in February by two liberal-leaning advocacy groups seeking the second volume of ex-special counsel Jack Smith’s final report. Cannon had barred disclosure in January.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges said the organizations had “established undue delay” by Cannon. But the panel said it would give her another two months to act before ruling on whether to lift her earlier order.

The fight over the Smith report is one of the last unresolved elements of the special counsel’s defunct criminal cases against Trump. After months of silence following his formal exit from the Justice Department, Smith recently returned to the spotlight to defend his office’s work and criticize actions by the Justice Department under Trump. The president has called him a “criminal.”

Smith’s office brought two sets of charges against Trump. Neither made it to trial before he won re-election in November 2024. Smith then dropped his pursuit of both indictments based on a Justice Department policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.

The special counsel’s final report was divided into two sections. The first dealt with his investigation into allegations that Trump conspired to obstruct the 2020 presidential election. The second concerned a probe into whether Trump illegally held onto classified material and obstructed U.S. officials trying to get the documents back.

Shortly before Trump returned to the White House in January, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland released the first section of Smith’s report related to the election conspiracy case.

But Cannon, who had presided over the classified documents case, barred the Justice Department from releasing the second section. By that time, Smith was no longer trying to press charges against Trump, but there was pending court action related to his two co-defendants.

Cannon, appointed by Trump in his first term, found that public release of the report risked “substantially impairing” their rights.

In February, the two outside organizations — American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — asked to intervene. They argued Cannon’s order was no longer justified because the Justice Department had stopped pursuing charges against Trump’s co-defendants and there was significant public interest in the contents of Smith’s report.

In July, they alerted Cannon that it had been 90 days since they made their requests. She didn’t take action. The organizations petitioned the 11th Circuit in late September to step in and reverse Cannon’s order so that they could press their demands for Smith’s full report under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The 11th Circuit panel included Judges Jill Pryor, Britt Grant and Nancy Abudu, who were appointed to the court by former presidents Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden, respectively.

“We’re pleased that today’s order recognizes that there is no legitimate reason for the court’s months-long delay in ruling on our request to make the special counsel’s report public,” Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in a statement.

Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement that “as the Trump administration targets its perceived political enemies over alleged mishandling of classified documents, today’s order is an important step toward increased transparency and accountability for the president’s own conduct.”

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. Last month, federal prosecutors charged John Bolton — Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-critic — with mishandling classified material.

The cases are In re: American Oversight, 25-13400, and In re: Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, 25-13403, US Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit.