Donald Trump during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday, January 7, 2025.Evan Vucci/AP
Donald Trump has won. He is set to be inaugurated on January 20, and he has convinced many Americans not only that his attempt four years ago to carry out a self-coup is not disqualifying, but that mentioning it now is kind of gauche.
Everyone feels they know what happened on January 6. It was on TV. So were the January 6 committee hearings. Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump in 2023 for four crimes related to his effort to subvert the 2020 election and revealed new information about Trump’s alleged crimes in a superseding indictment in October. There isn’t much left to learn.
The same, to a lesser extent, goes for Smith’s charges against Trump for obstructing government efforts to recover classified documents he lifted from the White House and the Trump’s Friday sentencing in New York following his conviction for falsifying documents to hide hush money payments.
And yet, Florida district court Judge Aileen Cannon’s latest comically pro-Trump ruling, her order Tuesday that temporarily blocks the public release of Smith’s report on his two criminal investigations of Trump, remains a big deal. So does New York Judge Juan Merchan’s scheduled sentencing of Trump on Friday, despite Merchan’s indication that he will not impose an actual penalty. That hearing remains on after a New York appeals court refused Trump’s last-ditch attempt to block it.
Trump has evaded consequences for his crimes—those alleged and those for which he was convicted—but his efforts to evade the truth, or at least to suppress it, continue.
That is what is at stake in Trump lawyers’ frantic recent attempts to block Smith’s report and Trump’s sentencing. Those efforts are part of the incoming president’s campaign to impose a public narrative in which his election equals his “complete exoneration” from the criminal charges against him, as his lawyers recently suggested in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. That isn’t true. Trump’s election did cause to Smith drop his cases to comply with DOJ’s policy against prosecuting presidents, and it seems to have led Merchan to plan to avoid penalizing Trump. But Trump’s narrow election victory does not make him innocent of the crimes he was convicted of and charged with.
A president conspiring to steal an election, in particular, remains bad, even if he wins the next one. Releasing Smith’s report, should Garland do that, would be a reminder of that truth.
Cannon on Tuesday dutifully complied with a heated demand from Trump’s lawyers. “The release of any confidential report prepared by this out-of-control private citizen unconstitutionally posing as a prosecutor would be nothing more than a lawless political stunt, designed to politically harm President Trump,” they wrote.
Justice Department regulations call for special counsels to submit confidential reports to the Attorney General at the conclusion of their investigations. Smith has prepared a two-volume report that is expected to detail his separate investigations Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election and to keep classified government documents he removed from the White House after his defeat. Cannon has no role in the January 6 case and only an arguable one in the documents one, which she already dismissed in a widely-faulted ruling Smith is contesting before an appeals court in Atlanta. Still, Cannon’s order applies to Smith’s findings in both of his investigations.
Trump, in a news conference Tuesday highlighted by his refusal to rule out preemptive wars to seize Greenland and Panama, reacted to Cannon’s order by calling her “a very strong and very brilliant judge.”
It’s not clear if Smith’s report will remain suppressed. Cannon, in her ruling, said she was blocking publication of Smith’s report only until the appeals court rules on a separate request to prevent publication of the report. The Justice Department, which said in a filing Tuesday that it has no plans to release either report before Friday, has not said if it plans to publish either volume of the report.
But as Trump prepares to limit dissent once he’s in office, Garland releasing the report, like Merchan going through with Trump’s sentencing, would be a modest but notable assertion of the limits of the aspiring autocrat’s power to dictate reality.
