WASHINGTON >> A federal judge in Florida stopped the Justice Department on Tuesday from releasing to Congress a potentially damning section of a report by former special counsel Jack Smith detailing his lengthy investigation of President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents after his first run in the White House.

In a strongly worded 14-page order, Judge Aileen Cannon said 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 Trump took office and assumed control of the Justice Department, Merrick Garland, then the attorney general, had proposed showing the classified documents section of Smith’s report to the four top leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees.

That was because the documents case is still active against Trump’s two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, and Garland was sensitive about revealing any information that could affect pending legal proceedings involving them.

Trump’s lawyers and the other defense lawyers in the case have vehemently fought the release of the report to anyone outside the Justice Department.