Federal Judge Orders DOJ to Provide Copy of Trump Raid Warrant
(jon-dougherty/)August 10, 2022
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Biden Justice Department to produce a copy of a search warrant executed at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where the FBI conducted a nine-hour-plus search on Monday.
Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered the DOJ to “file a Response to the Motion to Unseal” the warrant after requests were made by the Times-Union, a newspaper located in Albany, N.Y., as well as the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.
The judge said that the DOJ must respond no later than Aug. 15, reports said.
Reinhart signed off on the FBI’s warrant to search the former president’s palatial home in South Florida in what he said was an “unannounced raid on my home.” He took a leave of absence from a local U.S. Attorney’s office more than 10 years ago to represent employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein after they had gotten immunity during the lengthy probe of the now-late financier for sex trafficking.
The New York Post added:
Reinhart was elevated to magistrate judge in March 2018 after 10 years in private practice. That November, the Miami Herald reported that he had represented several of Epstein’s employees — including, by Reinhart’s own admission to the outlet, Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, who Epstein once reportedly described as his “Yugoslavian sex slave.”
Kellen and Marcinkova were among Epstein’s lieutenants who were granted immunity as part of a controversial 2007 deal with federal prosecutors that allowed the pervert to plead guilty to state charges rather than federal crimes. Epstein wound up serving just 13 months in county jail and was granted work release.
According to the Herald in 2018, the judge was later identified in a civil lawsuit accusing him of violating DOJ policies by changing sides during the Epstein investigation. The paper went on to suggest that Reinhart used insider information regarding the investigation in order to gain favor with Epstein.
Reinhart denied that he had done anything wrong in a 2011 affidavit while going on to claim that since he did not get involved in any federal probe of Epstein, he, therefore, had no access to any inside information regarding the case.
Earlier, Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan said that the warrant was “sealed” when agents showed up to search Trump’s estate.
Another Trump lawyer, Christian Bobb, meanwhile, told streaming network Real America’s Voice: “When I arrived and kind of announced myself as the legal representation for President Trump. I asked to see a copy of the warrant.”
“Initially they refused and said, ‘You know, we don’t have to show it to you.’ And there was a little bit of an exchange about whether it was appropriate to withhold the warrant when you’re searching the residence of the former president, who’s likely to be the Republican nominee in the next election, though they conceded and let me see it, they did not give me a copy of it right away, but they did let me see it,” she went on, according to Mediaite.
“It was very, I would say, thin. And as you can tell from public records, the affidavit, the supporting documentation of what the probable cause was to obtain the warrant has been sealed,” Bobb continued.
Mediaite said that several observers opined that Trump and his attorneys likely had a copy of the warrant beforehand but Bobb dismissed those claims.
“So we’re not allowed to see that. We have to go to court to request the judge to release that which, you know, may or may not happen. So we don’t know what the probable cause is, why they were allowed to search, but they did,” she reported.
“They also said that they were looking for classified documents, evidence of a crime as far as classified documents go,” Bobb explained.
“So they were looking for both classified information that they think should not have been removed from the White House as well as presidential records,” she continued, adding that she found it “ironic” for the search as a president can declassify any documents he wants and for any reason.
“It doesn’t really make any sense. And the same thing with any potential classified information, which I don’t believe there was any down there. We had done a search of it before and didn’t find anything noteworthy yet. I’m sure that they’re claiming that there was something terribly egregious, that a grave matter of national security. But we’ll find out,” Bobb said.
She added that she did not believe the FBI would go to any trouble to plant evidence, that instead the bureau would “just make stuff up.”
