Former special counsel Jack Smith oversaw an operation that pursued two parallel cases simultaneously. One focused on Donald Trump’s alleged crimes related to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, and the president’s efforts to remain in office despite losing his 2020 re-election campaign. The other, however, focused on the Republican’s alleged crimes related to his decision to bring classified documents to his glorified country club.

The former led to a rather devastating public report, released early last year, in which Smith and his team documented their findings. The former special counsel prepared a separate report on the latter, though one of the president’s allies on the judiciary has decided it should be hidden from public view. As my MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin summarized:

In her latest move benefiting Donald Trump, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted a request from him and his former co-defendants to block the release of Jack Smith’s report on the classified documents case he brought against them in Florida.

Cannon had dismissed the case in 2024 when Trump was running for president. The Justice Department was appealing her order, but dropped the appeal when he won the election, due to the DOJ’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.

According to Cannon, a Trump-appointed jurist, it would be unfair to Trump if the public saw the results of the investigation since, according to the same judge’s ruling in July 2024, Smith’s investigation was itself illegitimate.

For many legal and political observers, the move on Monday was disappointing but not surprising. Indeed, Cannon has not exactly covered herself in glory while overseeing Trump’s classified documents case.

When she first concluded that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional, a New York Times report explained that her ruling “flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era that upheld the legality of the ways in which independent prosecutors have been named.”

Noah Rosenblum, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, said he’d been skeptical of the idea that Cannon was undermining the rule of law to protect Trump but added that his perspective had changed. “This is bonkers,” Rosenblum wrote online in response to the judge’s dismissal of the case. “She is just making things up.”

Making matters more dramatic was the pattern of events. A separate New York Times report noted, “Judge Cannon has exhibited hostility to prosecutors, handled pretrial motions slowly and indefinitely postponed the trial, declining to set a date,” even after both the prosecution and the defense told her they were ready.

She also, incidentally, repeatedly gave observers reason to question her competence, lent credence to questions that legal experts consider absurd, refused to assign pretrial motions to a more experienced magistrate judge for reasons that were difficult to defend, and justified procedural delays by pointing to logjams that she had created herself.

I’m reminded anew of an infamous quote attributed to Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”

As the dust settles on Cannon’s latest decision, attention should shift to the White House, which is facing a new test of sorts.

Trump and his team routinely boast that this is the most transparent White House in American history, despite their eagerness to hide all sorts of things from the public (the president’s tax returns, the Jeffrey Epstein files, the evidence in support of the administration’s deadly military strikes against civilian boats in international waters, the recording of Tom Homan allegedly accepting a Cava bag with $50,000 in cash, the list of donors to Trump’s ballroom vanity project, the White House visitor logs and more).

If, however, Trump and his team want to prove just how committed they are to transparency, they could voluntarily agree to release the Smith report that Cannon wants to bury. Other previous presidents weren’t exactly thrilled when earlier special counsel reports were disclosed to the public, but they did it anyway.

So why keep the facts under wraps now?

This post updates our related earlier coverage.