Judge asks prosecutors to justify use of 2 grand juries in Trump documents case
By: Perry Stein
Because Trump............LMAO
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Monday asked federal prosecutors to explain the use of grand juries in Florida and Washington in the classified documents case against Donald Trump even though charges were filed in South Florida.
Cannon, the federal judge in South Florida assigned to the case, posed the question in a court filing Monday and told federal prosecutors to respond by Aug. 22.
“The response shall address the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the instant indicted matter in this district,” Cannon wrote.
Trump and two aides — Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — were charged this summer in a 42-count indictment that accuses the former president of improperly retaining 32 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club, and seeking to thwart government attempts to retrieve them.
Prosecutors first charged Trump and Nauta in June and added charges in a July superseding indictment. De Oliveira was first charged in the superseding indictment.
For many months, Justice Department prosecutors had questioned witnesses in the Florida case before a federal grand jury in Washington. The secret proceedings yielded much of the evidence at the crux of the case. But in May, the grand jury activity appeared to continue at a federal courthouse in Miami. Ultimately, prosecutors filed charges in a West Palm Beach courthouse — a courthouse in the same district as Miami and the area where Mar-a-Lago is located.
Prosecutors said in a court filing last week that they continued to use the grand jury in Washington after they initially charged Trump in June to investigate alleged instances of obstructing the investigation. The focus of the July superseding indictment was on obstruction, alleging that all defendants tried to delete security footage that the government wanted as evidence in the case.
“The grand jury in this district and a grand jury in the District of Columbia continued to investigate further obstructive activity, and a superseding indictment was returned on July 27, 2023,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
Prosecutors included that revelation in a motion asking the judge to consider holding a hearing to determine whether Nauta’s attorney has too many conflicts of interest to provide his client with adequate legal advice.
The government lawyers said Stanley Woodward — the Nauta attorney — has represented at least seven other clients whom prosecutors have interviewed about Trump’s alleged efforts to keep classified documents in defiance of the government’s demand they be returned. Two of Woodward’s clients could be called as government witnesses in the trial, the filing by the government said.
If that happens, Woodward may need to cross-examine his other clients as part of defending Nauta, said the prosecutors leading the Justice Department investigation.
The requested hearing — known as a Garcia hearing — is fairly common in legal proceedings. At the hearing, prosecutors said Cannon should inform Nauta and the two witnesses, whose names have not been made public, of their legal rights and the potential conflicts their attorney poses. Lawyers are generally required to flag to a judge any potential conflicts of interest they encounter.
Cannon said Nauta’s lawyers are expected to respond to the judge’s question about the two grand jury locations and the prosecutors’ request for the Garcia hearing.
Trump also has pending civil matters including a lawsuit in New York brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who in 2019 accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
In May, a New York jury awarded Carroll $5 million for defamation and battery stemming from the alleged encounter that Trump denies.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has set a January trial date for a new panel to hear a separate set of defamation claims alleged by Carroll.
Kaplan on Monday dismissed a set of counterclaims Trump filed against Carroll for calling him a rapist on TV after the jury found him liable for sexual abuse, not rape. The judge said Carroll’s interview comments were “substantially true as a matter of law” and that Trump “fails plausibly to allege that Ms. Carroll’s statements were not true.”
Shayna Jacobs in New York contributed to this report.
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Wanted to double down...............
Gonna get their azzes handed to them with this judge - fer shure, fer shure.
She's already questioning why this is so out of the chain.