WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: .......------------------------....... https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!F_xC!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06bfd92a-93be-4a59-81ec-cd3b34fa0187_1400x990.jpeg Top left: Columbia University logo (Wikimedia Commons) Right: Donald Trump (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Bottom left: Knight Institute logo (knightcolumbia.org) A Columbia University-funded legal group has lost two attempts to force the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report into President Donald Trump’s handling of classified information. But maybe the third time’s the charm! The Knight Institute—launched at Columbia in 2016 with $30 million in university funds—has filed a number of lawsuits against Trump and his administration over the past decade, but its recent focus is on obtaining the report Smith produced after his criminal case against Trump was thrown out. The federal judge who oversaw that case, Aileen Cannon, rejected the Knight Institute’s initial request to release Smith’s report in December. She ruled against the group again in February, permanently blocking the report’s release on the grounds that publicizing a report on charges that had been dismissed would be a “manifest injustice.” The Knight Institute recently filed an appeal to overturn Cannon’s rulings. It remains active. The attempts at legal #Resistance come in the wake of Columbia’s $221 million settlement with the Trump administration in the wake of the university’s failure to address campus anti-Semitism. The agreement required Columbia to abandon DEI in hiring and admissions and the Knight Institute threw a fit “issuing a scathing statement that called it a disastrous surrender of Columbia’s autonomy and an implicit endorsement of what the institute called the Trump administration’s ‘outlandish’ claims about DEI and the anti-Israel protests on campus,” our Chuck Ross writes. Columbia also administers the Pulitzer Prizes, the board of which is facing its own lawsuit from Trump for upholding its 2018 award to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on Russia’s role in the 2016 election. READ MORE: Columbia-Funded Legal Group Fights for Release of Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago Documents Report in Wake of University’s $221 Million Settlement With Trump