The cases ended.
The evidence was not acquitted.

First: allegations are not convictions

An indictment from a grand jury is permission to prosecute. It is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The documents indictment alleged willful retention, a plot to obstruct, hiding records, false statements, and acts involving surveillance footage.1 Trump, Walt Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira were all presumed innocent. No jury ever decided those claims.

Dismissed for who appointed the prosecutor

On July 15, 2024, Cannon ruled that the Attorney General had no legal power to appoint Smith the way he did. She threw out the documents indictment.7 This was a serious ruling about the Constitution. It was about who had power to prosecute. It did not decide whether the charged acts happened. DOJ later published its own analysis and disagreed. That is one branch's legal view. A higher court did not rule on it.5

The government appealed. After Trump won, it dropped the appeal against him under the sitting president rule. It later dismissed the rest against his co-defendants with prejudice.8 The Eleventh Circuit never issued a ruling on the merits backing Cannon's appointment analysis.

A prior Cannon ruling was reversed

Before the indictment, Cannon took control of Trump's civil challenge to the Mar-a-Lago search. She appointed a special master. A unanimous Eleventh Circuit panel reversed her. It wrote that the answer to whether the district court had that power was “no,” and ordered the civil case dismissed.2

That reversal does not prove every later Cannon ruling wrong. But it does show one thing. The claim that “the appeals court upheld her handling” is not an honest description of the earlier special-master litigation.

The election case ended for a different reason

The Supreme Court then ruled on immunity. It set protections for official presidential acts. It did not settle every claim in the case.3 After the 2024 election, Smith moved to dismiss the federal election case without prejudice. The filing said DOJ's rule blocks charging or prosecuting a sitting president. It said this did not depend on how serious the charges were, how strong the proof was, or the merits.4

Smith later wrote that his office believed the evidence allowed at trial would have been enough to convict. That is a prosecutor's view. It is not a verdict.4 This cuts both ways. No trial happened. So Trump was not convicted and not cleared.

The second report remains sealed

Volume I covers the election case. It is public. Volume II covers the documents case. Cannon permanently blocked its release outside DOJ. She refused to order it destroyed.9 The combined appeals were still pending, with no merits decision, through August 23, 2026.

This page does not describe what is in the sealed volume. Its true status is “Nonpublic under an injunction being appealed.” The words “destroyed,” “judicially disproved,” and “publicly verified” do not fit.