The federal judge who handled President-elect Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case temporarily barred the special counsel, Jack Smith, on Tuesday from releasing his final report on the investigation to the public.
In a brief ruling, Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who dismissed the documents case in its entirety this summer, enjoined Mr. Smith from sharing his report outside the Justice Department until a federal appeals court in Atlanta, which is now considering a challenge to her dismissal of the case, makes a decision about how to handle the report.
On Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants began a multipronged effort to stop the release of Mr. Smith’s report, which they claimed was “one-sided” and part of a “politically motivated attack” against the president-elect.
Mr. Trump’s legal team wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland asking him to stop the release of the report, which was set to be made public as soon as Friday. In a separate move, lawyers for Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the documents case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, went directly to Judge Cannon, of the Southern District of Florida, asking for an emergency order blocking the release….