Judge Aileen M. Cannon said prosecutors should not be allowed to share the report outside the Justice Department, adding that it contained information that had not been made public.
A federal judge in Florida stopped the Justice Department on Tuesday from releasing to Congress a potentially damning section of a report by the former special counsel, Jack Smith, detailing his lengthy investigation of President Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.
In a strongly worded 14-page order, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, said that federal prosecutors should not be allowed to share the section of the two-volume report with anyone outside the Justice Department, including members of Congress, given the risk that the information, some of which she said had not yet been made public, could slip out.
“Given the very strong public interest in this criminal proceeding and the absence of any enforceable limits on the proposed disclosure, there is certainly a reasonable likelihood that review by members of Congress as proposed will result in public dissemination of all or part” of the report, she wrote.
Before Mr. Trump took office and assumed control of the Justice Department, Merrick B. Garland, then the attorney general, had proposed showing the classified documents section of Mr. Smith’s report to the four top leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
While Mr. Garland released the other volume of Mr. Smith’s report — which concerned a separate criminal case that accused Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election — to the public, he was reluctant to take similar steps with the volume on classified documents.
That was because the documents case is still active against Mr. Trump’s two-co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, and Mr. Garland was sensitive about revealing any information that could affect pending legal proceedings involving them.