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CNN
—
President-elect Donald Trump has lost his attempt with a federal appeals court to block the Justice Department’s release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on investigations into him.
The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, however, left a three-day hold in place on DOJ’s release of the report, which could allow for more appeals, but it also invited the department to further challenge that hold.
The appellate ruling is likely to prompt more court activity over the special counsel’s work ahead of Trump taking office for his second term on January 20.
Trump is expected to appeal the 11th Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court.
Trump, and two of his employees who were charged in Smith’s classified documents probe, had sought to block the report’s release, including its volume about 2020 election subversion.
Earlier this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced plans to release the volume related to January 6, 2021, after the court’s approval. For now, though, he remains bound by the three-day hold that US District Judge Aileen Cannon placed on any publication following the appellate ruling.
Garland has decided not to publicly release the volume of the report dealing with the classified documents case, as Trump’s former co-defendants in that prosecution could potentially see the criminal proceedings against them revived in the future.
The report would be Smith’s final word on what his investigations turned up, after encountering several hurdles in court. In the election subversion case, he alleged that Trump and several unindicted co-conspirators undertook a multi-stage scheme to attack the peaceful transfer of power, culminating in the January 2021 assault on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.
The classified documents probe resulted in charges that Trump mishandled national defense information and obstructed the federal investigation into the documents’ whereabouts. Cannon, however, ultimately dismissed the case against the president-elect and his co-defendants on the grounds that Smith lacked the authority to bring it.
Trump, whose attorneys have been able to review a draft of the special counsel’s report, called it in court filings “nothing less than another attempted political hit job which sole purpose is to disrupt the Presidential transition and undermine President Trump’s exercise of executive power.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.
CNN’s Paula Reid contributed to this report.
