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trump indictment
Trump Tries to Permanently Stop DOJ From Releasing Jack Smith Report on Classified Documents Case
"Does he want the Smith report to be locked up with the Epstein files?"
Jan 21, 2026
As his administration continues dragging its feet in releasing the Epstein files, President Donald Trump is pushing to keep another potentially damning set of Justice Department documents hidden from the public.
On Tuesday, Trump filed a 19-page motion requesting that the US District Court of the Southern District of Florida step in to prohibit the DOJ’s planned release of Volume II of the final report prepared by former Special Counsel Jack Smith next month. The volume relates to the president’s handling of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.
Trump was indicted by a grand jury for 37 felony counts following Smith's investigation, 31 of which involved violations of the Espionage Act, after transporting "scores of boxes" full of classified materials, including top-level military and intelligence secrets, to his home at Mar-a-Lago and showing them off to people without security clearances.
But Smith ultimately dropped the case in November 2024 after it became clear that Trump's reelection would shield him from legal liability.
It's strange for the President of the United States to be litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs — but he's seeking an order barring "current, former and future" DOJ officials from releasing Jack Smith's second volume. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
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— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) January 20, 2026 at 6:38 PM
On January 7, 2025, just days before Trump reassumed office, the DOJ released Volume I of Smith's report, which pertained to Trump's attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election by spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud, which culminated in the attack on the US Capitol building by a mob of his supporters on January 6, 2021.
Though Trump's indictment in that case was also dropped following his reelection, the report was released under DOJ rules requiring public disclosure of all investigative reports after cases conclude.
That report described Trump as having undertaken an “unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power,” a scheme in which he knowingly spread information casting doubt on the election result even after his own staff confirmed it to be false and he acknowledged his loss in private.
Unlike the election case, the classified documents case was dismissed in July 2024 by the Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon of the same district court, who ruled that Smith's appointment as special counsel was unlawful.
Cannon also issued an injunction blocking the release of the report to Congress, but only until February 24, 2026, so as not to prejudice the legal proceedings against Trump's co-defendants, former aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira, who were accused of helping him illegally stash documents and hide them from investigators.
Citing her previous ruling, Trump is now asking Cannon to permanently block the report, claiming that, because of her ruling against Smith, "all acts undertaken" by him, including the creation and release of the report, are "void."
Not only does he seek to prohibit the "current" DOJ from releasing it, but also "former and future" DOJ officials from ever releasing it, as it would result in the "public dissemination of sensitive grand jury materials, attorney-client privileged information, and other informationderived from protected discovery materials, raising significant statutory, due process, and privacy concerns for President Trump and his former co-defendants."
Trump's request to permanently spike the report immediately drew comparisons to the Epstein files, which remain almost entirely unreleased by the DOJ nearly a month after the deadline mandated by law, which was signed by Trump himself after being passed in November.
For over a year, efforts to halt the release of Smith's report have fueled concerns of a cover-up and raised questions about whether Cannon has any authority to issue rulings at all, since the case has been dismissed.
In a piece for MS NOW (then MSNBC) last year, after the first report was released, legal analyst Glenn Kirschner warned that if the second one were buried in perpetuity, it could allow Trump to escape legal consequences after his term is up.
"If there is no disclosure of Volume II to members of Congress, what might a Trump-led DOJ do to the evidence?" he asked. "Might it be destroyed in an attempt to make sure Trump is never held to account for the classified documents crimes? Recall that the documents case was dismissed without prejudice, which means the case could theoretically be refiled once Trump leaves office."
His colleague, former US Attorney Joyce Vance, noted the peculiarity of Cannon's assertion of authority in a case that had already been dismissed.
"The strangest thing about this entire proceeding is that Judge Cannon continues to issue orders when there is no case pending in front of her," she said. "That’s not how a court’s jurisdiction is supposed to work.”
After appearing at a closed-door deposition last month as part of an inquiry launched by Republicans, Smith is scheduled to testify publicly before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday at 10 am ET.
Smith's lawyer, Lanny Breuer, told the Associated Press earlier this month that "Jack has been clear for months he is ready and willing to answer questions in a public hearing about his investigations into President Trump's alleged unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified documents."
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When Trump Rails Against DC Crime, the Call Is Coming From Inside the House
Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in DC, luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes?
Aug 23, 2025
US President Donald Trump, always looking to distract attention from his many crimes, has deployed National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officials in Washington, DC. After his usual wild exaggerations about “…violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youths, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” he moves to impose what is becoming his police state over an overwhelmingly Democratic city
As Trump’s troops fan out across more of the city, they are told to be aggressive, take credit for arrests made by the local DC police force, and arbitrarily interrogate DC residents, for example, people waiting at bus stops, minding their own business.
Trump, during his first and current terms, rarely stepped out of his limousine to see what DC is like (See James Fallows’ article “What It Actually ‘Feels Like’ in DC” August 13, 2025). He finally visited with a cluster of his police and troops yesterday, passing out “cheeseburgers prepared by the White House chef’s staff and around 100 pizzas from Wiseguy Pizza,” and quickly declared Washington a safer city after less than two weeks of his forces patrolling largely tourist and downtown business areas.
The reaction from DC residents is mostly negative. Business is already slowing for DC restaurants and will only get worse as Trump brings in more National Guard troops from Republican states, paid for by the taxpayers.
Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets?
Homicides in DC are at a 30-year low. They are far lower than in many cities in the red states headed by white mayors. Trump seems to go after cities that happen to have Black mayors, further illustrating his racist bigotry, along with downplaying slavery and reinstalling Confederate statues and returning Confederate names to military bases.
To be sure, there ARE two grave and deadly ongoing crime waves in DC. One is clearly the violence surging from Trump’s White House, with big weapons and big tax dollars to fund and shield mega-terrorist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughtering genocide of civilians in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank.
Trump has continued the “co-belligerency” that former President Joe Biden established with the Israeli regime. Every day, far more babies, children, mothers, and fathers have been killed from this brutal Trump-Netanyahu axis than are killed in a year in DC.
The deliberate cutoff of lifesaving medical, food, and water assistance to millions of the impoverished in less developed countries occurred when Trump illegally closed the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Humanitarian relief groups already count the preventable deaths in the many thousands. Cutting off food and vaccines will have devastating long-term consequences.
Domestically, convicted felon Trump openly violates many criminal statutes and constitutional provisions (See the April 30, 2025, letter to President Trump citing 22 Impeachable Offenses). For example, he daily violates the Anti-Deficiency Act by spending large sums of money NOT appropriated by Congress. He violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal property for electoral campaign purposes. (See the June 28, 2023, letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland by me and Bruce Fein.) He glories in obstruction of justice—a felony. His former first-term national security adviser, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir that “obstruction of justice was a way of life at the White House.”
Trump is continuing this offense in his second term with vengeance. He engages in flat-out open extortion in dealing with universities and several large corporate law firms. The list goes on. Recall that Trump said in 2019 that “with Article II, I can do whatever I want as President” and has repeatedly declared that he has never done anything wrong in elective office. It is understandable that scores of psychologists have described him as a dangerous and delusional personality. The worst is yet to come from the egomaniacal Trump.
As for the K Street offices of hundreds of corporate lobbyists, where does one start? They are, along with heaping piles of campaign cash, making sure that neither Congress nor government agencies of the Executive Branch stop the corporate crime wave. The Big Business paymasters spend whatever it takes to ensure that crime in the suites is never aggressively prosecuted.
Read the weekly Corporate Crime Reporter? (Give your library a gift subscription.) For 39 years, it has been reporting documented corporate crimes of violence (toxic pollution, dangerous products, workplace casualties), and economic crimes and thefts from workers, consumers, investors, students, and pensioners.
Imagine the mainstream media reports on more corporate crimes than budget-starved law enforcement can begin to prosecute. Check out “60 Minutes,” the New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Reuters, and even the Wall Street Journal. For enjoyable, factual reading, try the books by Jim Hightower and his regular newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
Hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths occur annually from these violations, and the preventable injuries and illnesses are much larger in number.
Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in DC, luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes? Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets? To ask is to answer. Power, money, and greed camouflage the corporate criminal deeds from journalists who do not or are not allowed to see them in plain sight.
We have a political economy steeped in self-deception, taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat and not making the lethal corrosions on peace and justice serious campaign issues in elections. Voters, of course, can end this cowardly silence.
Who will be the first reporter to ask Trump in his many informal gatherings with the press, about these two booming crime scenes representing the Oligarchy and the Plutocracy?
When will the reporters and their editors stop wallowing in a cultural rut where common candor requires uncommon courage?
Remember, it’s all in plain sight to behold and then be told.
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We Are All Paying the Price for Merrick Garland’s Abject Failure
Decades from now, historians will memorialize Garland not as a dedicated public servant but as the head of the Justice Department who brought a butter knife to an existential gunfight with Trump, quickening our collective descent into neo-fascism.
Jan 22, 2025
It’s hard to say who is the worst attorney general in American history. The candidates are many and comprise a veritable rogue’s gallery of sadists, reactionaries, and incompetents. They range from A. Mitchell Palmer, mastermind of the original Red Scare that decimated the left in the wake of the First World War, to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and William Pelham Barr, who sacrificed the rule of law in service to Donald Trump.
Merrick Garland may not share the malignancies of his fellow train wrecks, but he deserves to be in the discussion. Decades from now, historians will memorialize Garland not as a dedicated public servant and fair-minded federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court was torpedoed by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans, but as the head of the Justice Department who brought a butter knife to an existential gunfight with Trump, quickening our collective descent into neo-fascism.
After his appointment to helm the DOJ, Garland had one overarching mission: to swiftly convene a grand jury to investigate Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. This was a task a third-year law student could easily have accomplished. Garland failed, abjectly.
Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and—to put it in the vernacular—balls were needed to stop Trump.
Probable cause for an early indictment was abundant and obvious. On January 6, millions of Americans watched Trump stand on the Ellipse at the south end of the White House and urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Millions watched the actual assault that followed, blow by medieval blow. Even the corrupt McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in February 2021, declared on the Senate floor, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day [January 6].”
Instead of targeting Trump and his chief lieutenants immediately, Garland set out to arrest and try the foot soldiers of the uprising. And while he did a commendable job in that respect (eventually charging more than 1,500 with federal crimes), he dithered on Trump until November 2022, when he appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to probe Trump for the insurrection and absconding from the White House with a trove of highly classified documents.
By then, it was too late.
Although Smith secured an indictment of Trump in Washington, D.C., for conspiracy, obstruction, and election subversion on August 1, 2023, the indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court (Trump v. United States) the following July in a decision that granted Trump sweeping and unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution.
Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong conservative activist with an undeserved reputation as a judicial institutionalist, the ruling is arguably the worst edict handed down by the high court since the Dred Scott case of 1857. “Trump v. United States is distinct as a deliberate attack on the core institutions and principles of the republic, preparing the way for a MAGA authoritarian regime much as Dred Scott tried to do for the slavocracy,” wrote Sean Wilenz in a scathing article for The New York Review of Books.
Smith also indicted Trump in Florida in the documents case, but that prosecution was subsequently scuttled by District Court Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon, an inexperienced MAGA sycophant whom Trump installed on the federal bench in the runup to the 2020 election.
In addition to Garland, the Supreme Court, and Cannon, former President Joe Biden also shares responsibility for letting Trump off the hook. From Day 1, Biden should have used the bully pulpit to attack, isolate, and destroy Trump and his MAGA base. Instead, he pursued a politics of accommodation, preaching a return to the false neoliberal normalcy of bipartisanship. Most critically of all, Biden decided to seek a second term, when it was apparent to everyone with two eyes and ears that he was no longer fit, either physically or mentally, for another stint behind the Resolute Desk. With Biden’s approval rating plunging to 40%, former Vice President Kamala Harris had little to no chance of defeating Trump at the polls.
But standing atop the heap, Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and—to put it in the vernacular—balls were needed to stop Trump before the forces of reaction had time to regroup and reorganize. They are now in control.
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