Judge Cannon's Recent Releases

US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the District of Southern Florida is overseeing the United States v Trump case regarding the mishandling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. Beginning Monday, April 22, she has been releasing versions of documents in the case that had previously been heavily redacted.

The unredacted court filings published on April 22 revealed, among other things, the code name Plasmic Echo for the FBI investigation into those documents, and I covered this development here last Friday. In that post, I linked to a Washington Examiner story that described the release as covering "hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted".

Alt journalists have since been combining through those files. One result has been a not-fully-explicated theory that many of the documents seized by the FBI in the August 8, 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid had been removed from the White House by the General Services Administration and sent to the National Archives during the transition on January 20, 2021, placed on pallets and kept in the Archives' possession, but then sent to Mar-a-Lago prior to the FBI raid. Just this past Sunday, Matt Margolis at PJ Media reported,

Investigative journalist Julie Kelly found something interesting in the documents that could change everything. The first things [sic] is testimony from an FBI agent who testified that the General Services Administration (GSA) had been in possession of Trump's boxes in Virginia before ordering Trump's team to come get them.

. . . So, it appears that the Biden administration may have been responsible for shipping classified information to Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. This development is significant because Trump has previously blamed the GSA for packing the boxes that contained the classified documents, only to later accuse Trump of essentially stealing them and using that as pretext for sending the FBI to raid his Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.

. . . While this may not prove the Biden administration set up Trump in the classified documents case, considering the way the Biden administration has abused the legal system against Trump, no one can confidently say they wouldn't.

Even so, it still raises other legitimate questions. For example, if the GSA had been in possession of the boxes, why wasn't a review of the materials conducted before they instructed Trump's team to get them? When it comes to classified information, they wouldn't have expected Trump and his staff to be responsible for ensuring that classified documents weren't among the records. Perhaps they did review the contents of the boxes and knew classified documents were contained in them before they told Trump's people to come get them.

Yesterday, Judge Cannon authorized the release of unredacted, or less-redacted, versions of previously sealed defense motions to dismiss the United States v Trump (and others) case for vindictive or selective prosecution. The first motion released, altbough apparently others will follow, is from Trump's co-defendant Walt Nauta. According to the Washington Examiner,

Nauta’s defense attorneys said their client’s decision to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights at one point during the initial stages of the investigation had prompted the DOJ to punish Nauta by prosecuting him, when others had engaged in the “same type of conduct” that Nauta did, the attorneys wrote.

Nauta made the dismissal request in February, but it had been sealed until Friday evening. The Florida court docket shows Trump filed a similar argument that his charges should be dismissed on the grounds that they were “selective and vindictive,” but the actual filing remains sealed.

Judge Aileen Cannon has over the past week unsealed several previously nonpublic filings, and she has indicated that three of Trump’s dismissal arguments, including the selective and vindictive one, will be unsealed by May 2.

According to this site,

Vindictive prosecution occurs when the government, typically the prosecuting authority, retaliates against a defendant for exercising their legal rights. These rights may include requesting a trial , asserting the right to remain silent, or challenging the government's actions by filing a motion to suppress, filing a motion to dismiss after preliminary hearing or filing a motion to dismiss at arraignment. Vindictive prosecution undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system by discouraging defendants from exercising their rights for fear of facing additional, unwarranted charges.

While the site goes on to say that vindictive prosecuiton can be difficult to prove, a successful motion can result in dismissal of the charges or reduction in charges. The Washington Examiner story indicates that the basis for Nauta's motion is Nauta's eventual assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights, after he had been cooperating with the investigation, at which point the Justice Department prosecuted him, when it hadn't prosecuted others who had been doing similar things.

The criminal defense attorney Robert Gouveia has reviewed Nauta's now unsealed motion in detail in this YouTube presentation. This contains among other things the same allegation covered in last week's unredacted documents concerning an alleged attempt by one of Jack Smith's prosecutors, Jay Bratt, to intimidate Stanley Woodward, counsel for Mr Nauta, but it provides the additioonal detail that Nauta's attorney Woodward was asking to have a "filter" applied to data in Nauta's phones, which could contain e-mails covered by attorney-client privilege.

The attempt by Bratt is interpreted here as an effort to get Woodward to drop the request in return for the promise of a federal judicial appointment.

On one hand, it appears that various investigative journalists are still reviewing the hundreds of pages that Judge Cannon ordered unredacted last week. On the other, we still have at minimum the additional motions from Trump and another defendant that will be unsealed on Thursday. Gouveia and others are speculating that the unsealings and unredactions by Judge Cannon could be a leadup to other actions related to the defense motions to dismiss, but as Gouveia says, we'll simply have to wait and see.