Jack Smith spent Tuesday answering questions about basketball instead of discussing the substance of his dismissed classified-documents case against Donald Trump.
Now the other part of the story is moving fast.
Just one day after Smith’s Senate appearance, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled oral arguments in the legal fight over Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to permanently block the release of Volume II of Smith’s final report on the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
And the court isn’t waiting until next year.
The hearing is now scheduled for November 2 at 2 p.m. in Atlanta, according to Law&Crime, which cited the Knight First Amendment Institute. The parties had previously been preparing for arguments in January 2027.
That’s a pretty dramatic acceleration in a case that has been crawling through the courts for months.
The Knight Institute and American Oversight are challenging Cannon’s decision and asking the appeals court to overturn it and allow Volume II to be made public.
Cannon permanently blocked the Justice Department from releasing the report in February after Trump and his former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, sought to prevent its disclosure. She stopped short of ordering the report destroyed, but her injunction prohibits the DOJ from releasing, sharing or transmitting Volume II outside the department.
In practical terms, the report remains locked away. That’s what the challengers want to change.
The Knight Institute and American Oversight argue that Cannon’s decision improperly rejected the public’s right of access and that the appeals court should vacate the injunction and place Volume II on the public docket.
Now they’ll get the chance to make that argument before the 11th Circuit much sooner than expected.
The timing is especially notable because the case had already gone through multiple rounds of procedural maneuvering. The appeals court consolidated the challenges earlier this year, and the parties have been briefing the question of whether Cannon’s permanent injunction should stand.
Then came the new hearing date. November 2. That puts the showdown just one day before the midterm elections.
And it comes at an interesting moment for Smith, who was back in the spotlight Tuesday while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Republican senators grilled the former special counsel over his investigations of Trump, including his handling of classified documents and his separate investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Sen. Eric Schmitt’s attempt to confront Smith over an alleged Atlanta Hawks game quickly turned into one of the strangest moments of the hearing after the senator appeared to confuse the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes, whom Smith actually watched play Maryland. Reuters described the exchange as a misunderstanding.
But when the questioning turned to the actual substance of his investigations, Smith remained firm.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith told senators.
He also said that if he were presented with the same facts today, he would prosecute a former president regardless of whether that president were a Republican or a Democrat.
And the fight over whether the public gets to see the facts is now heading toward a major appellate hearing.
Trump, Nauta, De Oliveira and the Justice Department have continued to defend keeping Volume II from public release. The Knight Institute and American Oversight are asking the appeals court to reverse Cannon’s injunction.
For months, Cannon’s order appeared to have put the report behind a legal wall.
But now, the legal fight over Smith’s buried Mar-a-Lago report has suddenly moved onto a much faster track — and that wall could come down fast.
