donald trump have won He is scheduled to take office on January 20, and he has convinced many Americans that the self-governing coup he attempted four years ago is not only a disqualification, but that bringing it up now is a kind of bluff.
I think everyone knows what happened on January 6th. It aired on TV. The same was true for the January 6th committee hearing. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith indicted Trump in 2023 on four criminal counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and revealed new information about Trump’s alleged crimes in a superseding indictment last October. There isn’t much left to learn.
The same goes for Smith’s indictment of Trump for obstructing government efforts to recover classified documents taken from the White House and for Trump, who was found guilty of falsifying documents to conceal hush payments, when he was sentenced in New York on Friday.
But Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon’s latest ludicrous pro-Trump ruling, Tuesday’s order to temporarily block the release of Smith’s report on two criminal investigations into Trump, remains a big deal. New York Judge Juan Merchan was scheduled to sentence Trump on Friday, although Merchan indicated he would not impose an actual penalty. Those hearings are continuing even after a New York appeals court rejected Trump’s last-ditch attempt to block them.
Trump has dodged consequences for the crimes he was accused of and found guilty of, but his efforts to avoid the truth, or at least suppress it, continue.
That’s what Trump’s lawyers are banking on in their recent frantic attempt to block Smith’s report and Trump’s sentencing. The effort is part of the president-elect’s campaign to force a public narrative of his election’s “complete innocence” from the criminal charges against him, as his lawyers suggested in a recent letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. That’s not true. Trump’s election prompted Smith to drop his case to comply with the DOJ’s policy on prosecuting presidents, which appears to have led Merchan to plan to avoid punishing Trump. But just because Trump narrowly won the election doesn’t mean he’s not guilty of the crimes he was convicted of and charged with.
In particular, a president who conspires to steal an election remains in bad shape even if he wins the next election. If Garland does so, releasing Smith’s report will be a reminder of that truth.
On Tuesday, Cannon dutifully followed Trump’s lawyer’s heated demands. They wrote, “Disclosing a confidential report written by an uncontrollable private citizen unconstitutionally posing as a prosecutor would be nothing more than an illegal political act designed to harm President Trump politically.”
Department of Justice regulations require the special counsel to submit a confidential report to the attorney general upon completion of the investigation. Smith has prepared a two-volume report that is expected to separately examine Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election and his efforts to keep classified government documents removed from the White House after his defeat. Cannon played no role in the Jan. 6 incident, playing only a controversial role in documents she has already dismissed in a widely flawed ruling that Smith is challenging in the Atlanta Court of Appeals. Nonetheless, Cannon’s order applies to both investigations by Smith.
Trump responded to Cannon’s order at a press conference Tuesday, emphasizing that he was not ruling out a preemptive war to seize Greenland and Panama, calling her “a very strong, very good judge.”
It’s unclear whether Smith’s report will remain unpublished. In his ruling, Cannon said he was blocking publication of Smith’s report only until the appeals court rules on a separate request to prevent its publication. The Justice Department, which said in a Tuesday filing that it does not plan to release both reports before Friday, has not said whether it plans to publish both volumes of the reports.
But as Trump prepares to limit dissent once he takes office, Garland’s release of the report just as Merchandise is being sentenced by Trump is a modest but notable assertion about the limits of an ambitious dictator’s power to dictate reality. It will be.
