As former special counsel Jack Smith is slated to give a closed-door deposition on Capitol Hill next week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are demanding that the Justice Department release Smith’s final report about the classified documents stored at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club after his first term.
In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin and 18 other Democratic members of the committee wrote that she had “suppressed Volume II of Special Counsel Smith’s report with absolutely no justification.”
“You continue to deprive Congress and the American people of the single most important and comprehensive account of that investigation, in clear violation of DOJ’s consistent practice of publicly releasing reports of Special Counsel investigations,” they wrote.
Earlier this month, Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan sent Smith a congressional subpoena demanding he show up at 10 a.m. next Wednesday to testify about the way he investigated Trump and his associates. Smith oversaw criminal investigations into Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, as well as the way he stored dozens of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Trending
Jordan has maintained that Smith’s prosecutions were “partisan and politically motivated” while accusing him of employing “disturbing tactics” — pointing to what he called the “unnecessary and abusive raid” of Mar-a-Lago. Raskin and other Democrats on the committee want to know what exactly Smith uncovered during that investigation that never made its way into the indictment that ultimately charged Trump with 40 criminal counts of illegally keeping national security documents and trying to cover it up.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland rushed to release Volume 1 of Smith’s final report in the closing days of the Biden administration. But the Trump-appointed jurist who oversaw his Mar-a-Lago case in Florida and ultimately gave his 2024 presidential bid a boost when she dismissed it before the election, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, forbade release of the second half — claiming that doing so “risks substantial prejudice to the due process rights” of Trump’s two remaining co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira.
However, Democrats point out that reasoning no longer applies.
“The Trump Department of Justice quickly dismissed the proceedings against Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveria in February, ten months ago. For ten months you have had zero legal basis for withholding the report,” they wrote to Bondi, urging her to ask Judge Cannon for a green light to release it.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also went straight to Cannon on Friday, filing an amicus brief asking her to reconsider her previous ruling now that “those proceedings have long since ended.”
In a statement, DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassare said the DOJ had no role to play at the moment.
“The Department of Justice is under a court order not to release Volume II of this report. During Attorney General Bondi’s confirmation, Democrats repeatedly sought assurances that her department would follow court orders – what changed? The department will continue to respect the rule of law and ignore these political stunts,” she wrote.
Smith’s lawyers, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, did not respond to a request for comment Friday morning.
For months, Republicans in charge of the Senate and House judiciary committees have been threatening to subject Smith to public verbal floggings over his handling of the two investigations that dogged Trump for years before his second term in the White House.
Through his lawyers, Smith has offered to testify in an open hearing but Republicans have refused.
Volume 2 of his report was mentioned in a letter Smith’s lawyers sent to top Republicans on both committees in October, in which the former prosecutor noted that he’d need DOJ guidance on what he could say about the Mar-a-Lago final report. He also said he’d need access to the special counsel files to refresh his memory.
Author
