WASHINGTON (AP) — A report by former special counsel Jack Smith on his investigation into President Donald Trump’s collection of classified documents belongs in the “can of history” and should remain sealed, the Justice Department said in a court filing Friday.
“The illicit product of an illegal investigation and prosecution belongs in the dustbin of history. The United States will leave it there,” the prosecutors wrote.
The department’s position echoes that of Trump, whose lawyers this week asked US District Judge Aileen Cannon to permanently block the release of the Smith report. This raises the possibility that a detailed report on a criminal investigation once considered a significant legal threat to Trump could continue to remain hidden from public view.
Smith and his team produced a two-volume report on the investigations into Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Biden and the retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after he left the White House after his first term.
Both investigations produced charges that were dropped by Smith’s team after Trump’s victory in the November 2024 election in light of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution.
The volume on the election investigation was released in the final days of the Biden administration. But Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge in Florida who has issued numerous rulings favorable to Trump and his two co-defendants in the classified documents case, last year granted a defense request to at least temporarily halt the release of the report dealing with that case. That edict meant Smith could not discuss the substance of that investigation when he testified Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee.
The injunction is due to be lifted on 24 February.
But Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, where the case was filed, said in a three-page court filing that the report should remain sealed. He and another prosecutor in that office, Manolo Reboso, wrote that Smith’s investigation was “illegal from its inception”.
They also wrote that Attorney General Pam Bondi had determined that the report was “deliberative internal communication that is privileged and confidential and should not be released” outside the Department of Justice.
“Smith not only armed the Department of Justice against a leading presidential candidate in pursuit of an anti-democratic goal, but he did so without legal authority and while targeting constitutionally protected activity,” prosecutors wrote.
Smith, during his testimony Thursday, defended his investigations into Trump and insisted that he had acted without regard to politics and had no second thoughts about the criminal charges he brought.
“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held accountable. So this is what I did,” said Smith about Trump.