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Judge Aileen Cannon (left) during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight nomination hearing on July 29, 2020 (U.S. Senate via AP), Special counsel Jack Smith (right) speaks about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Aug. 1, 2023, at a Department of Justice office in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The judge overseeing the federal government’s prosecution of Donald Trump over the former president’s allegedly wrongful retention of documents in his home at Florida’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida has ruled that unredacted versions of filings containing the names of government witnesses will be made public.
The Tuesday ruling from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon says that special counsel Jack Smith failed to make his case to keep the documents redacted.
“Following an independent review of the Motion and the full record, the Court determines, with limited exceptions as detailed below, that the Special Counsel has not set forth a sufficient factual or legal basis warranting deviation from the strong presumption in favor of public access to the records at issue,” Cannon wrote in the order.
Most of Smith’s proposed redactions concerned “sealing the identity of potential Government witnesses and their statements,” and in support of that, Smith “refers in general terms to witness safety and intimidation,” Cannon said in the order.
It wasn’t enough.
“Although substantiated witness safety and intimidation concerns can form a valid basis for overriding the strong presumption in favor of public access, the Special Counsel’s sparse and undifferentiated Response fails to provide the Court with the necessary factual basis to justify sealing,” the judge wrote.
Smith’s argument that public disclosures of witnesses’ identities or statements ahead of trial risks “infecting the testimony of other witnesses or unnecessarily influencing the jury pool” also fell flat.
“Even accepting those rationales for sealing, the Special Counsel’s submission offers nothing in the form of concrete factual support for those rationales or otherwise identifies any supporting evidence in the record to justify granting the Special Counsel’s broad and unspecified requests on those bases,” Cannon wrote.
The judge also denied Smith’s request to shield the FBI code name of a separate investigation, finding that “the Special Counsel fails to identify the information at issue, provide any explanation about the nature of the investigation, or explain how disclosure of the code name would prejudice or jeopardize the integrity of the separate investigation (assuming it remains ongoing).”
Cannon, a Trump appointee, did grant Smith’s request to redact certain “personal identifying information” from the filings and entrusted that task to the former president’s legal team.
“Defendants are therefore [] to comb the materials carefully and redact email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, social security numbers, and any home addresses,” the order says. Additional information, including the “signals intelligence sub-compartments,” a reference to a type of intelligence gathering, can also be withheld from the public.
Cannon ordered the defendants to file, under seal, a “proposed public version consistent with this Order” for her to review prior to unsealing.
