The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case on charges of retaining classified documents ordered the former president’s lawyers to redact information about roughly two dozen witnesses from a public version of one of their court filings, reversing an earlier decision that had allowed no redactions.
The ruling means Trump must instead substitute pseudonyms – for instance, Trump employee 1 or FBI agent 1 – when referring to people inside Trump’s orbit and others involved in the investigation that could be the target of threats of harassment.
But though the US district judge Aileen Cannon granted the principal request from the special counsel Jack Smith, she used the order to rebuke prosecutors for filing a motion to reconsider, imposed new conditions and ruled against prosecutors in allowing testimony transcripts to be public.
The biggest defeat for prosecutors in the 24-page ruling was the judge’s decision to allow Trump to include in his public filings witness statements that are exempt from discovery and other substantive testimony as long as it did not identify potential witnesses.
Such disclosures of witness statements could influence the testimony of other witnesses, chill the participation of other witnesses, or be read by prospective jurors ahead of trial.
The fight over witnesses between the judge and prosecutors, which has spilled into other areas in recent weeks and led prosecutors to threaten to appeal her rulings to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, started in January after Trump asked to get more discovery materials from prosecutors.
The motion to compel was partially redacted and submitted with 70 accompanying exhibits, many of which were sealed and redacted. But Trump’s lawyers asked that those sealed filings be made public because many of the names included in the exhibits were people already known publicly.
Prosecutors asked the judge to deny Trump’s request to unseal his exhibits, using broad arguments that they would reveal the identity of potential witnesses, two sub-compartments of what is described as “signals” intelligence, and details about a separate investigation run by the FBI.
The arguments from prosecutors were deemed too broad by Cannon, who ruled that personal identifying information of witnesses and the information about signals intelligence should remain under seal, but everything else could be public.
Prosecutors told the judge they could not understand why Trump needed to identify potential trial witnesses and federal investigators in their filings. They contested Cannon’s order, with the implicit threat that they would appeal to the 11th circuit to have her reversed if the motion was denied.
The reversal from Cannon ultimately granting the motion appeared to be an acknowledgment of the embarrassment and potential ammunition she could give prosecutors to have her removed from the case if she denied their request and then got overturned on appeal.
But in doing so, she rebuked prosecutors in scathing terms and blamed prosecutors for placing her in such a position. “Special counsel’s newly raised arguments could have and should have been raised previously,” she wrote in one terse subhead.
