The judge overseeing the case over former President Donald J. Trump’s secret documents granted a request from federal prosecutors and ordered his lawyers on Tuesday to remove the names of about two dozen government witnesses from a public version of one of their court filings in order to to protect them from potential threats or harassment.
In a 24-page ruling, Judge Aileen M. Cannon ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to refer to the witnesses in their files by a pseudonym or categorical description — John Smith or FBI Agent 1, for example — rather than identifying them by Surname.
Special counsel Jack Smith had expressed deep concern about the safety of witnesses, an issue that touched on several of Mr. Trump’s criminal cases. The people prosecutors sought to protect included “career officials and former close advisers” to Mr. Trump, including one who told them he was so worried about possible threats from “Trump world” that he told investigators the Record refused to interview him.
Judge Cannon’s decision reversing her original ruling on this matter was notable in that it followed current practice. After making a series of unorthodox rulings and allowing the case to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved legal questions, the judge came under intense scrutiny. Each of her decisions has been scrutinized by legal experts to provide guidance on how she plans to proceed on other matters.
But as in other rulings in which she ruled in favor of Mr. Smith, Judge Cannon used her decision on Tuesday to target the special counsel with whom she had clashed. Although she agreed with him, she noted that his request to protect “all potential government witnesses without differentiation” was “blanket in nature” and that she “could not locate another high-profile case” in which a judge made a similar ruling had decision.
The dispute over the witnesses began in earnest in early February, when Mr. Smith’s prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to reconsider a ruling she made that allowed Mr. Trump to publicly name about 24 witnesses in court papers they filed to investigate the to request additional investigative information from the government.
Prosecutors told Judge Cannon that they could not understand why attorneys would need to identify any of the witnesses as part of their request for more information. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have argued that he has free speech rights to call the witnesses, but Mr. Smith’s deputies have scoffed at that claim.
“This is not about Donald Trump violating the First Amendment,” one of the prosecutors, David Harbach, said at a hearing in the case last month. “That’s just not it. And we have to call it what it is.”
Prosecutors also told Judge Cannon that they would appeal her decision to an appeals court if she refused to reverse her original decision allowing Mr. Trump to release the names. They were prepared to confront them directly because publicly identifying the witnesses would expose them to “unacceptable and unnecessary risks,” they said.
“There is a well-documented pattern in which judges, agents, prosecutors and witnesses involved in cases involving Trump have been subjected to threats, harassment and intimidation,” prosecutors wrote.
Judges in two of the former president’s other cases — one in Washington and one in Manhattan that is scheduled to go to trial next week — have imposed gag orders against him specifically to protect witnesses from his attacks.
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2024-04-10 00:30:08
www.nytimes.com