A federal court on Tuesday condemned the Department of Justice’s efforts to provide members of Congress Volume II of the Special Counsel report while criminal prosecutions related to the report remained ongoing. While the country has moved on from the issue following Donald Trump’s inauguration, last week’s order crystalizes the Biden Administration’s outrageous weaponization of the DOJ against not just Trump but those associated with him.
Two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the DOJ announced its intent to publicly release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigations into Trump’s challenges to 2020 election and Trump’s retention of supposedly classified documents. Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom had been charged by Smith as co-defendants with Trump in the classified documents case, responded by filing an emergency motion to prevent the release of the report.
Trump and his two co-defendants had previously moved for the dismissal of the indictment, arguing that Smith had been improperly appointed and thus lacked authority to prosecute the criminal case. The presiding judge, Trump-appointee Aileen Cannon, agreed, and dismissed the case. The Biden Administration appealed to the Eleventh Circuit.
Following Trump’s election, the DOJ dismissed the appeal as to Trump, while continuing to challenge the dismissal of the criminal charges against Nauta and De Oliveira. And thus, the two co-defendants remain in criminal jeopardy.
Nonetheless, the DOJ announced its plans to release the special counsel report which detailed its investigation into Nauta and De Oliveira. Attorney General Merrick Garland would later walk back the release, announcing that his department would only publicly release Volume I of the report — which concerned the 2020 election — and for Volume II, it would limit access to that report to the majority and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
