Jack Smith Reminds Us: Aileen Cannon Is Still Destroying America

Most of the obvious reactions to Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday have already been delivered, and I agree with them. It’s hard to imagine what on earth Chairman Jim Jordan—and hearing his whiny, tinny, angry, lying voice awoke involuntary physiological reactions I’d spent years trying to vanquish—and the Republicans thought they were accomplishing. To any non-Kool-Aid-drinking American, they looked ridiculous. Smith was calm. The Republicans were jumping out of their skins competing to get their sound bite featured on Fox News. All they managed to do was to remind people that Donald Trump is a criminal and that in a sane world, the Senate would have convicted him on the second impeachment (the January 6 one) and barred him from holding federal office for life.

I want to focus on one matter I’d forgotten all about. I’m thinking maybe you had too. That’s the question of this second volume of Smith’s report on Trump’s crimes, which focuses not on January 6 but on Trump’s theft of those classified documents he took down to Mar-a-Lago. It was written by Smith and his team back when the investigation was active. It is generally presumed to contain details about the matter that are heretofore unknown. Its release to the public was blocked by—speaking of memories I’d successfully repressed—Florida Judge Aileen Cannon.

I trust you remember her track record here. She tossed the classified documents case in July 2024, ruling that Smith had been improperly appointed to his position as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland. From the moment the case landed on her docket, Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, barely concealed her obvious partisanship in her actions, which brought her some jaw-dropping reprimands from the Eleventh Circuit Court, which employs her. She was a judicial joke.

But she didn’t stop during the campaign. No! Once Trump was safely back in the White House, she ordered, on the second day of Trump’s second presidency, that the Department of Justice could not release the second volume of the Smith report (the first part had been released by Garland’s Justice Department the week before, in the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency).

A couple of nonprofit legal outfits sued. Cannon dragged her feet. She spent 2025 ignoring petitions from the two nonprofits that were seeking to get the volume released. Finally, last November, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit—which, by the way, included one Trump appointee—chastised Cannon’s delays and gave her 60 days to do something.

The 60 days came and went at the beginning of this month, and—shocker—nothing happened. Then, as fate would have it, just this Monday, three days before Smith’s public testimony, the matter of the second volume vaulted back into the news as a lawyer for Trump filed a motion asking Cannon to permanently block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees” (note well: future officers!), from making the second volume public.

Two points here. First, we have the rather odd spectacle of Trump, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney put it on Bluesky, “litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs.” But of course the key word in the motion, as noted above, is “future.” If Cannon grants this motion and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, even that future attorney general won’t be allowed to release Volume II.

Second—about Trump’s lawyer. We’ve seen the basket of deplorables Trump has hired to defend either him or his government in court: Alina Habba, illegally installed as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, who resigned after a court disqualified her; Todd Blanche, still the number two at Justice, famous for his softball interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and for defending moving her to a cushier prison; Emil Bove, who while at Justice ordered the sleazy dropping of all charges against then–New York Mayor Eric Adams, which led to nearly a dozen resignations.

Now we must add to that sorry menagerie a certain Kendra Wharton, who filed this week’s motion to Cannon. Who is Wharton? She was a white-collar criminal defense attorney in 2023 when Blanche announced that she and Bove would be joining Trump’s legal team to defend him against Smith’s charges. Later, when Trump took office the second time, he tapped Wharton to serve as the Justice Department’s senior ethics official. The prior one resigned after he was reassigned to a unit charged with cracking down on sanctuary cities. “Trump ethics official,” one suspects, is all we need to know about her.

So let’s take a step back. Trump took thousands of documents, more than 300 marked classified, with him to Mar-a-Lago in 2021. For months, he rebuffed polite requests by the FBI to cooperate with an inquiry. Finally, they raided the place. Naturally, Trump turned this into a deep-state persecution, and his willing propagandists complied in pushing that lie.

Then the roulette wheel of fate gave the case to the hackiest federal judge imaginable. She tossed the case. And she has spent her time since then making sure that the public never learns any more details about what Trump did. Next up, she’ll surely agree to the motion filed by a lawyer who played a willing role in helping Trump and Pam Bondi wreck the Justice Department.

And even if somehow Cannon denies the motion and Volume II somehow gets released? Well, it’s Bondi who’ll decide how much of it we get to see!

The Epstein files were supposed to be released in full on December 19. Bondi has done nothing. Volume II by rights should have been released some time last year. But Cannon did nothing. This is banana republic democracy, hiding corruption from public view while the president they’re all protecting seeks to destroy NATO and boost Vladimir Putin, and as he sends a quasi-gestapo force of ill-trained goons out into the streets of our cities to shoot people. And doing all they can to play along, as they showed us Thursday, are House Republicans, who’ll never stop debasing themselves in the race to prove to Trump which among them can be most servile.