Attorney General Garland will soon release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on President-elect Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election — but not the prosecutor’s reflections on the classified documents case against the 47th president and two of his employees and co-defendants. 

That plan emerged from a motion filed by the Department of Justice to the 11th United States Appeals Circuit. That motion opposed a request by those two co-defendants — Waltine Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira — to bury the report in its entirety. Mr. Smith has already submitted his report to Mr. Garland.  

Now, the United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Markenzy Lapointe, writes: “The Attorney General intends to release Volume One” — the part covering January 6 — “to Congress and the public.” The section on the storage of documents at Mar-a-Lago, though, will remain hidden “so long as defendants’ criminal proceedings remain pending.”

The future of that second report is now shrouded in mystery. Mr. Lapointe, an appointee of President Biden, has announced his intention to resign on January 17, and Mr. Smith has also said he will take his leave before Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Trump will be empowered to appoint a new United States attorney — and a new attorney general, a position for which he has nominated Florida’s former chief law enforcement official, Pam Bondi. 

It appears unlikely that the new regime at the Department of Justice would authorize any part of the report’s release, or continue to prosecute Messrs. Nauta and De Oliveira. The pair could also be eligible for a presidential pardon from Trump, who will soon be empowered to extend clemency for what the Constitution calls “offenses against the United States,” which mean federal crimes like the ones charged by Mr. Smith.

Trump has been unrelenting in his criticism of Mr. Smith. At a press conference on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect called the prosecutor a “mean, nasty guy” and riffed that “they brought this moron out of the Hague … he executes people. He shouldn’t be allowed to execute people, because he’ll execute everybody. He’s a nutjob.” Before Mr. Smith was appointed special counsel, he worked as a prosecutor of war crimes.    

That secret section, at least for now, will be available for “review only by the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees upon their request” and their promise not to publicize the contents. At stake, Mr. Lapointe contends, is “the Attorney General’s authority to decide whether to make such a report public.” That discretion is granted to Mr. Garland by the special counsel regulations under which Mr. Smith operates.

Mr. Lapointe wants the circuit riders to vacate an injunction imposed by Judge Aileen Cannon, who enjoined Mr. Garland from releasing any part of Mr. Smith’s report pending word from the 11th Circuit. It is not clear, though, whether Judge Cannon still has jurisdiction over the case following her dismissal of the charges against all three defendants after finding that Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith unlawfully, as he was not a government employee who’d previously been confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Smith appealed that ruling to the 11th Circuit, but then moved to dismiss the case as it relates to Trump after he won the presidential election. The DOJ now argues that Judge Cannon’s ruling is “irrelevant to the only action here at issue—the handling of the Final Report by the Attorney General.” Judge Cannon’s holding only applies to South Florida, not to Mr Smith’s activities at the District of Columbia, where the election interference case was filed. 

President Trump has reviewed draft copies of both sections of the report, as he is a defendant in both cases. Messrs. Nauata and De Oliveira have only been permitted to review the section that covers their prosecutions. Mr. Lapoint argues that “there is no basis for defendants or anyone else to seek to bar the Attorney General from disclosing” the part of Mr. Smith’s work that touches solely on Trump’s alleged efforts to reverse the result of the 2020 election. 

Trump’s position, conveyed in a letter appended to the motion filed by Messrs. De Oliveira and Nauta, is that the “release of any confidential report prepared by this out-of-control private citizen unconstitutionally posing as a prosecutor would be nothing more than a lawless political stunt.” Mr. Smith has signaled that Mr. Garland will not release any part of the report before Friday at 10 a.m.