Donald Trump and two of his allies are making a last-minute push to block special counsel Jack Smith from issuing his final report on his two dismissed criminal cases against the president-elect.
Trump’s lawyers wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday, urging him not to release Smith’s report — a two-volume document that they were allowed to review in Smith’s office over the past three days.
At the same time, two of Trump’s former co-defendants asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to block the Justice Department from releasing any report from the special counsel on the criminal case in Florida where Trump was charged with conspiring to retain a trove of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.
In the letter to Garland, Trump’s attorneys said that releasing a public narrative of the evidence Smith gathered — in the classified documents case as well as the federal election conspiracy case over Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election — would illegally interfere with the presidential transition and be little more than a political attack.
The decision about releasing Smith’s findings, they wrote, should be left to Trump’s administration.
They also called on Garland to immediately fire Smith, who is set to end his tenure by the time Trump is inaugurated.
“Because Smith has proposed an unlawful course of action, you must countermand his plan and remove him promptly,” attorneys Todd Blanche and John Lauro wrote.