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Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon made a not-so-subtle play for President Donald Trump’s attention. The Southern District of Florida judge—a longtime favorite of Trump’s—issued an order banning the release of a report detailing former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal investigation into the hoards of boxes filled with classified documents that Trump took on his way out of the White House in 2021. With this decision, Cannon, who was confirmed just weeks before the end of Trump’s first term, went out of her way to rule on a question that she does not technically have jurisdiction over, while simultaneously positioning herself for a promotion—with a looming potential Supreme Court opening quite possibly on Cannon’s mind.

Just to remind you: Before Trump was elected, Judge Cannon slow-walked that investigation for months before ultimately ruling—without precedent and backed by no other court—that Smith had been illegally appointed, so his indictment of Trump had to be thrown out. This was 2024. Cut to this past Jan. 20, when Waltine Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, Trump’s co-defendants in the classified documents case, submitted a motion requesting that Cannon permanently ban the U.S. Department of Justice from releasing Smith’s final report on his classified documents investigation, widely referred to as Volume II. (Volume I was his final report on his election interference case, which came out in January 2025 just before Trump reentered office.) On Monday Cannon granted that request, with a side of gratuitous attacks on the former special counsel.

Cannon’s order restated that Smith was wrongfully appointed as special counsel—again, she’s the only judge who’s come to this conclusion. She went further, though, accusing Smith of concocting a “brazen stratagem” to “circumvent” her initial ruling by … writing the report per the instructions of the special counsel statute. “To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the dismissal order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it,” Cannon wrote.

What Cannon claimed as a personal affront, though, was merely Smith following the law. Throughout the entire history of the special counsel statute, every single one has produced a final report detailing their investigations to the attorney general. And no matter if a Republican or Democratic administration was in power, the report was made public as a form of transparency. Nevertheless, Cannon decided to challenge history and argued that the Department of Justice cannot release Smith’s report because there’s never been a situation where “a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt, at least not in a situation like this one, where the defendants contested the charges from the outset and still proclaim their innocence.”

That is categorically false. In 2019, former special counsel Robert Mueller conducted an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and found evidence that Trump obstructed justice on multiple occasions. Though Mueller ultimately did not bring charges against Trump, probably because DOJ rules prohibit prosecuting a sitting president, he did explicitly state his investigation “does not exonerate” the president. And yet, Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr still chose to make Mueller’s final report of his investigation public (with some redactions), even though there remained a chance that charges could be brought.

Cannon’s additional reasons to suppress Volume II—beyond her insistence that Smith had no power to compile or submit it—were characteristically incoherent. She wrote that allowing the public to see the prosecutors’ work product “would contravene basic notions of fairness and justice in the process, where no adjudication of guilt has been reached following initiation of criminal charges.” This claim has no actual basis in law or precedent: Courts routinely disclose this kind of information about criminal defendants who are charged but not convicted. For better or worse, the government can tarnish a defendant’s reputation by releasing investigative materials that make them look guilty in the absence of a guilty verdict. Cannon asserted that doing so here would violate “the presumption of innocence held sacrosanct in our constitutional order,” but that is nonsense. The presumption of innocence is a legal principle that applies at trial; it does not give courts a license to gag a co-equal branch of government in a lawless quest to protect a defendant’s reputation in the public eye.

Perhaps the most galling part of Cannon’s order, though, was that she issued it at all. Since January of 2025, the Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University has been pushing Cannon to release Smith’s report under the Freedom of Information Act. After she sat on those requests for the better part of 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit finally intervened to compel Cannon to issue a response within 60 days. Finally in December she did, unsurprisingly denying the Knight Institute’s motion. The group immediately appealed her decision to the 11th Circuit the next day.

Once the Knight Institute took its case to the appeals court, the question of whether Smith’s report on his classified documents investigation should be released to the public officially changed hands. Now the 11th Circuit holds exclusive authority over the future of the report, not Cannon. In fact, the appeals court has already put the case on an expedited schedule, with oral arguments scheduled for June. Yet Cannon decided to publish her order anyway, in what seems like a transparent attempt to preempt—or influence—higher courts using Nauta and de Oliveira’s moot January motion as pretext.

“There has been no basis for Judge Cannon to prevent the release of Volume II since, for over a year, we’ve argued that she had no proper basis, no jurisdiction, to enjoin its release once the case fully came to an end,” Scott Wilkens, senior counsel for the Knight Institute and the leader of the group’s legal battle over the public release of Smith’s Volume II report, told me.

Notably, during this legal battle, Smith publicly testified before Congress about this decision to indict Trump just last month. “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.” The president, as he’s known to do, took to Truth Social to share his thoughts, which included describing Smith as a “deranged animal” who Attorney General Pam Bondi should be “investigating”—part of Trump’s ongoing campaign to cow anyone he perceives as a threat with vindictive prosecutions.

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Though undoubtedly problematic, Cannon’s decision to issue her latest order comes as no surprise. From the moment she was assigned to oversee Smith’s classified documents case, Cannon consistently contorted the law and used her position as a district court judge to issue decisions that would stymie Smith’s investigation and help Trump’s defense, despite facing some humiliating reversals along the way. Cannon remained steadfast in proving her loyalty to Trump, obstructing prosecutors at every turn, eventually dismissing charges altogether—and now seeking to prevent the results of Smith’s investigation from ever seeing the light of day.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Cannon chose to release her order on Monday, since just a few weeks ago rumors began swirling that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is preparing to retire as soon as this summer. Who better to replace him than a young, fortysomething judge who has spent the past four years proving her fealty to the president in a case that dogged his presidential campaign, threatened him with prison, and which she just sought to bury once and for all?

It seems safe to assume Judge Cannon has an idea.

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ELSEWHERE IN JURISPRUDENCE

In the most recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick unpacks the Supreme Court’s latest decision ruling against President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, with Mark Joseph Stern. The 6–3 ruling is confusing, with numerous concurrences and dissents, but the bottom line is that six justices came together to declare Trump had exceeded his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in his monthslong tariff whiplash. 

In the most recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick unpacks the Supreme Court’s latest decision ruling against President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, with Mark Joseph Stern. The 6–3 ruling is confusing, with numerous concurrences and dissents, but the bottom line is that six justices came together to declare Trump had exceeded his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in his monthslong tariff whiplash. 

In that same episode, Dahlia also examines the press clause of the First Amendment. In conversation with Sonja West and RonNell Andersen Jones, scholars and researchers who authored The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times, they discuss what the Framers meant when they characterized the press as special, along with Trump’s escalating campaign against the press and its real-life consequences, as seen just last week with CBS blocking Stephen Colbert from interviewing a Democratic Senate candidate from Texas. 

In that same episode, Dahlia also examines the press clause of the First Amendment. In conversation with Sonja West and RonNell Andersen Jones, scholars and researchers who authored The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times, they discuss what the Framers meant when they characterized the press as special, along with Trump’s escalating campaign against the press and its real-life consequences, as seen just last week with CBS blocking Stephen Colbert from interviewing a Democratic Senate candidate from Texas. 

During the Slate Plus segment, Dahlia and Mark discuss the bittersweet departure of Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, plus the case of a Justice Department lawyer who is being held in civil contempt by a Minnesota judge.

During the Slate Plus segment, Dahlia and Mark discuss the bittersweet departure of Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, plus the case of a Justice Department lawyer who is being held in civil contempt by a Minnesota judge.

Friend of Slate Mary Ziegler also explains the latest conservative fight over abortion down in Texas, where a midwife is facing civil and criminal charges for allegedly performing illegal abortions and practicing without a license. The case is far from a slam dunk for the state, though, illustrating just how tricky it is to prove an abortion actually occurred.

Friend of Slate Mary Ziegler also explains the latest conservative fight over abortion down in Texas, where a midwife is facing civil and criminal charges for allegedly performing illegal abortions and practicing without a license. The case is far from a slam dunk for the state, though, illustrating just how tricky it is to prove an abortion actually occurred.

In a piece about the Supreme Court’s decision in USPS v. Konan, Mark explains how the 5–4 decision manipulates commonly understood definitions of “miscarriage” and “loss” in order to afford immunity to the U.S. Postal Service when it intentionally destroys or refuses to deliver mail to Americans. And even more disturbing is the timing of the decision, coming just months ahead of midterm elections that will determine the balance of power in Washington and in which mail ballots will play a crucial role. 

In a piece about the Supreme Court’s decision in USPS v. Konan, Mark explains how the 5–4 decision manipulates commonly understood definitions of “miscarriage” and “loss” in order to afford immunity to the U.S. Postal Service when it intentionally destroys or refuses to deliver mail to Americans. And even more disturbing is the timing of the decision, coming just months ahead of midterm elections that will determine the balance of power in Washington and in which mail ballots will play a crucial role. 

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