Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
MSWASHINGTON (AP) — A report by former special counsel Jack Smith on his investigation into President Donald Trump's hoarding of classified documents belongs in the “dustbin of history" and should remain sealed, the Justice Department said in a sharply worded court filing Friday.
“The illicit product of an unlawful investigation and prosecution belongs in the dustbin of history. The United States will leave it there,” prosecutors wrote.
The department's position echoes that of Trump, whose lawyers this week asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to permanently block the release of the Smith report. It adds to the likelihood that a detailed report on a criminal investigation once seen as posing significant legal peril to Trump might continue to remain hidden from public view.
Smith and his team produced a two-volume report on investigations into after he lost to Biden and his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after he left the White House following his first term.
Both investigations produced indictments that were after Trump's November 2024 election win in light of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution.
The volume on the election investigation was released in the final days of the Biden administration. But Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge in Florida who issued multiple favorable rulings for Trump and his two co-defendants in the classified documents case, last year granted a defense request to at least temporarily halt the release of the report dealing with that case. That edict meant that Smith could not discuss the substance of that investigation when he testified Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee.
The injunction is set to lift on February 24.
But Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, where the case was filed, said in a three-page court filing that the report should remain sealed. He and another prosecutor in that office, Manolo Reboso, wrote that Smith's investigation was “unlawful from its inception.”
They also wrote that Attorney General Pam Bondi had determined that the report was “an internal deliberative communication that is privileged and confidential and should not be released” outside the Justice Department.
“Smith not only weaponized the Department of Justice against a leading presidential candidate in pursuit of an anti-democratic end, but he did so without legal authority and while targeting constitutionally protected activity,” the prosecutors wrote.
Smith, during his testimony Thursday, defended his investigations of Trump and insisted that he had acted without regard to politics and had no second thoughts about the criminal charges he brought.
“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did,” Smith said of Trump.
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