A day before Jack Smith’s tightly restricted appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump’s personal lawyers went to a federal appeals court with a pointed accusation: that a federal judge timed her sanctions order to embarrass Attorney General Todd Blanche just as he faced Senate confirmation.
In a filing running nearly 60 pages, attorneys representing Trump, his two eldest sons, the Trump Organization, and two lawyers behind the president’s lawsuit against the IRS argued that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams handed down “extraordinary, unjust” sanctions that wrongly treated the mere act of filing the lawsuit as evidence of collusion and bad faith.
Back in July, Williams ruled that Trump and his legal team could be responsible for covering the attorneys’ fees of outside parties who had objected to what she called a “non-adversarial” and “collusive” case. She also referred Trump’s lead attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for discipline.
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Those outside parties, or amici curiae, included 35 former federal judges along with former IRS and Treasury officials. They raised objections just as Trump moved to voluntarily drop the case, only for him to turn around and announce a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund framed as a settlement — one that also shielded him and his family from any future backward-looking tax investigations.
The appeal largely sidestepped Williams’ underlying finding that the plaintiffs had pursued a multibillion-dollar case built on claims they knew, or should have known, were already too late to bring. Instead, the brief zeroed in on what it described as an “utterly unprecedented restriction on speech” — specifically the portion of her order that barred “improper references to the ‘settlement agreement,'” which she had branded a sham.
The filing claimed Williams’ timing wasn’t coincidental, suggesting she meant to damage Trump politically by silencing Blanche, his nominee at the time.
“This timing was no accident: two days before Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, the court issued its opinion littered with legal, factual, and citation errors condemning conduct under Senate review, directed that its accusations be sent to his disciplinary authorities, and purported to dictate what he could tell Senators about the case,” the brief argued. “An Article III judge thus interfered with the Article II confirmation process, supplying a judicial condemnation of the nominee’s conduct, while purporting to restrict his ability to respond.”
Jack Smith returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, still barred from discussing Volume II of his final report — the section covering the investigation into Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and the accusations that he conspired to obstruct their return.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s permanent injunction keeping that volume sealed remains backed by Trump in his personal capacity, his former co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, and the Justice Department under Trump.
On appeal, First Amendment advocacy groups and Senate Democrats have filed briefs pushing to finally get the Mar-a-Lago findings released publicly.
Senators argued that Cannon’s injunction overlooked the fact that there’s no real adversity between Trump as a former co-defendant and Trump as head of the executive branch in this dispute, and that it has hampered Congress’s ability to properly scrutinize FBI Director Kash Patel.
“[A]ccording to public reports, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Mr. Patel to testify before a grand jury investigating President Trump’s retention of classified materials after leaving office and granted Mr. Patel immunity to facilitate his testimony in November 2022 after Mr. Patel invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions,” read a letter sent by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to then-Acting Attorney General James McHenry on Jan. 29, 2025, laying out their interest in the report at that time.
Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., signed onto that brief, and he opened Smith’s latest hearing by calling Cannon a “MAGA loyalist.”
“It is sad to see my colleagues contort themselves to support President Trump’s lies. I expect that will continue today because of the limits placed on Mr. Smith’s ability to testify by MAGA loyalist Judge Aileen Cannon and the Trump Administration,” Durbin said. “Judge Cannon has enjoined the release of Volume II of the Special Counsel report on the classified documents investigation, and Mr. Smith himself is enjoined from providing information about that investigation unless the Justice Department has made that information public.”
“There was nothing untoward about Special Counsel Smith and his fellow prosecutors conducting this investigation,” Durbin added.
Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, previously cited what she called “careful study” when she dismissed Trump’s indictment on grounds that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful.
About a year and a half later, she criticized Smith again, this time for what she called his “brazen” decision to release the report at all.
Also on Tuesday, a three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit rejected a request — backed by Trump and the DOJ — to pause Williams’ sanctions order while the appeal plays out. The panel wrote that Trump and his lawyers “have not persuaded us to construe the sanction more broadly and have not made a strong showing that they will prevail on their First Amendment challenges.”
“They do not cite any authorities suggesting that a speech-related prohibition imposed as a penalty for conduct determined to be sanctionable violates the First Amendment. Indeed, in judicial proceedings, ‘whatever right to ‘free speech’ an attorney has is extremely circumscribed,'” the panel’s order stated.
