The Structural Reasons Aileen Cannon Will Delay the Release of the Details of Jack Smith’s Prosecution of Trump
- john raymond
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
The question is not whether Judge Aileen Cannon will try to delay release Jack Smith’s second report on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. The question is why she almost has to.
Once you analyze her position in terms of regime security and incentives rather than doctrine, the pattern is obvious: delay is her weapon, complicity is her only insurance, and the law offers her no real protection in either future that matters to her.
To see this clearly, you have to start with the procedural facts...
Smith’s investigation produced a two-volume final report. Volume I, covering Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, was released in January 2025. Volume II, detailing the classified-documents case and Trump’s obstruction at Mar-a-Lago, was finished at the same time but remains sealed under an injunction Cannon issued, barring the Justice Department from releasing it “outside the Department.”
By that time, Cannon had already dismissed the Mar-a-Lago indictment. On July 15, 2024 she ruled that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional and threw out the case against Trump and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
Smith tried an appeal, then abandoned it after Trump’s November 2024 victory, and DOJ dismissed the remaining charges against the co-defendants in early 2025. In other words: there is no active or future prosecution tied to Volume II in her court.
Despite that, Cannon blocked DOJ from releasing Volume II not only to the public but even to Congress in its oversight role.
Transparency groups including the Knight First Amendment Institute and American Oversight moved to intervene and lift the gag. She sat on those motions for months. The Eleventh Circuit finally stepped in on November 3, 2025, finding “undue delay” and giving her 60 days — until roughly January 2, 2026 — to resolve the intervention requests and decide whether to keep or lift her injunction.
So the situation now is simple on paper. There is no live case. A federal appeals court has told her to stop stalling. Advocacy groups and media organizations are pressing for release. Congress has obvious oversight interests in seeing a definitive account of a president’s alleged mishandling of classified material and obstruction of justice.
Trump himself has just moved to participate as amicus curiae, urging Cannon to keep the report sealed and accusing Smith of running “unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”
If you look at this only as a legal problem, Cannon appears boxed in. There is no ongoing criminal proceeding to justify shielding the report. The Eleventh Circuit has already suggested that her inaction is no longer tolerable.
And the traditional pattern in special counsel cases has been release: Mueller’s report was published with redactions, the Durham report was released, and Volume I of Smith’s report has already been made public.
In that frame, the arguments for continued secrecy — protecting reputations of “uncharged persons,” avoiding “extraordinary prejudice” to the former co-defendants — look thin and opportunistic.
But Cannon is not operating inside that frame. She is operating inside a regime-security frame. Her problem is not “how do I best apply the law.” Her problem is “what strategy maximizes the survival chances of Trump’s project and my own position within it.”
Once you state the question that way, her incentives are straightforward.
First, delay protects Trump immediately. Volume II is not just another internal memo. It is a detailed, footnoted narrative of his conduct in the clearest criminal case he faced: post-presidency hoarding of classified documents and obstruction of federal efforts to recover them.
In the hands of Congress, it would instantly become a focal point for oversight, impeachment inquiries, and future legislative constraints on presidential abuse of classification and pardon powers. In the hands of the public, it would harden the perception that the classified-documents case was not a “witch hunt” but a structurally solid prosecution aborted by Trump’s return to power.
From a regime-security perspective, there is no upside to Cannon or Trump in having the document released now. While it cannot be used to convict him while he is in office — Smith’s charges are gone and DOJ is bound by its policy against prosecuting a sitting president — it can be used to weaken his political position, strengthen the resolve of internal defectors, and give future prosecutors a roadmap.
Keeping it sealed preserves the current equilibrium, in which many insiders can still tell themselves that “no one really knows” what Smith found.
Second, delay protects Cannon herself. Her handling of the case has already drawn repeated criticism, reversals, and now an explicit finding of “undue delay” by the appeals court.
The longer she obstructs transparency around a now-dismissed prosecution, the clearer it becomes that she is not a neutral Article III judge but a political actor sharpening her bench powers into tools of obstruction. That raises real impeachment and discipline risks for her if Trump’s project fails and anything like a rule-of-law regime reasserts itself.
Volume II, once released, will not only describe Trump’s conduct; it will help define the seriousness and strength of the case she killed. It will give Congress and the public a baseline against which to measure her July 2024 dismissal, her January 2025 gag order, and her subsequent stalling.
The more authoritative and damning the report appears, the more her own interventions look like complicity in obstruction, not judicial disagreement. Rationally, she wants that moment postponed as long as possible.
Third, she cannot rely on “the law” as a hedge in either future that matters to her. If Trump succeeds in consolidating an authoritarian system, the law will not protect her; only loyalty and usefulness will. A judge who applied the law faithfully but harmed the regime is expendable. A judge who bent the law to protect the regime is an asset. She is behaving accordingly.
And if Trump fails and a more normal constitutional order returns, the law will not protect her either; her rulings, delays, and injunctions will be evidence in any inquiry into how the judiciary was captured and misused. From that vantage point, her only plausible insurance policy is to maximize her value to Trump now, in the hope that he wins strongly enough and quickly enough, to shield her permanently.
That is the structural logic of her delay. Each day she maintains the injunction is a day in which:
Trump is not facing a fresh, detailed public indictment-by-report of his illegal Mar-a-Lago conduct.
Congressional oversight committees are denied the single best documentary summary of a case they may later use to anchor impeachment, reform, or referrals.
Transparency groups are kept fighting over procedure instead of analyzing substance.
And Cannon herself is kept in the ambiguous zone between “controversial judge” and “clearly complicit actor,” buying time while the regime’s fate is decided elsewhere.
This is why the Eleventh Circuit’s 60-day order is best understood as a clash between two structures. On one side is the appellate system insisting that district judges cannot endlessly sit on motions touching matters of national importance without consequence. On the other is a captured judge whose survival strategy is built on stretching that delay as far as she can without triggering immediate intervention.
The core point is simple. There is no structural bar that prevents Cannon from allowing DOJ to transmit Volume II to Congress in its oversight capacity. The criminal case is dead. The usual prosecutorial concerns about prejudicing a jury no longer apply.
The constitutional system anticipates that Congress will review executive-branch misconduct of exactly this kind. Her ongoing blockade is not a structural necessity; it is a structural choice, dictated by her position inside Trump’s regime.
Analyzed that way, Cannon’s behavior stops looking inexplicable or eccentric. It is the predictable output of the incentives she faces. She is doing what a loyalist judge in a fragile authoritarian project does: using every inch of procedural discretion to preserve the existing equilibrium, to buy time for the leader, and to gamble that complicity now will pay off later.
Whether that gamble succeeds is a political question. But the reasons she will delay are not mysterious. They are baked into the illicit structure that she clearly serves.