An off-hand remark—or a terribly misconstrued one—by a federal prosecutor at a private meeting with a defense attorney in Donald Trump’s classified documents case may add yet another delay to the former president’s already severely delayed trial.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has already earned a reputation for making bizarre rulings that favor the man who appointed her to the bench, pushing back a trial that could have started long ago.
Now comes another potential opportunity for Cannon to side against Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith—this time over a wild story about possible prosecutorial misconduct by a key member of his team.
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Last week, Smith filed court papers formally addressing the allegation that DOJ counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt made a veiled threat against defense lawyer Stanley Woodward when he started representing Navy veteran Waltine Nauta, a longtime Trump aide known as his Diet Coke valet.
The meeting now in question took place Aug. 24, 2022, nearly a full year before the Trump assistant was indicted for moving boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in what prosecutors allege was an attempted coverup to protect his boss.
According to Trump’s side, Bratt casually noted that Woodward was being considered for a judge position in local District of Columbia courts—and wouldn’t want to screw that up by playing hardball, keeping his client quiet, and frustrating the federal investigation into Trump.
“Mr. Bratt attempted to coerce Mr. Nauta’s compliance with the investigation by dangling potential favorability on Mr. Woodward’s potential judicial nomination,” Woodward and another one of Nauta’s lawyers wrote on Friday. “Put differently, Mr. Woodward was presented with two options: Our way or the hard way.”
Option Two was a supposed “campaign of intimidation and harassment” that followed when Woodward wouldn’t help the feds flip his client. The lawyers for Trump’s assistant are now trying to leverage that and get the case dismissed, citing “vindictive prosecution”—a stark enough accusation that has federal prosecutors in damage control mode.
The same day Nauta’s defense lawyers made their legal filing, Smith’s team felt compelled to address “false accusations that cannot go unanswered.” In their version, Bratt couldn’t have possibly said such a thing, particularly since the counterintel chief didn’t even know Woodward was up for a judgeship. They claim that all Bratt did was incorrectly note what he mistakenly thought was Woodward’s service on D.C.’s local judicial nominating commission—only to be corrected by Woodward.
Prosecutors are trying to get Cannon to reflect on the way this accusation only popped up nine months after the meeting—shortly after investigators sent Trump and Nauta “target letters” putting them on notice that a potential indictment was coming. The strategy could make clear that it was only when the former president and his assistant felt like they were in hot water that they made up an excuse to cry foul.
Prosecutors stress that the entire story seems like a stretch.
“This accusation was never leveled before June 2023, and is implausible to say the least. It rests on a tortured theory that a 30-year veteran federal prosecutor, with three other federal prosecutors watching, attempted to extort a defense attorney he had just met by threatening to contact the White House, in violation of department policy, in order to discourage the president from advancing a long-dormant nomination to the superior court bench, unless the attorney promised to secure the cooperation of a client who had just retained him,” the prosecutors wrote. “Simply put, the accusation is false.”
“At no point did Bratt respond with anything that could be considered a threat or a suggestion of a quid pro quo,” they added. “It did not happen.”
This issue is yet another potential roadblock in a case full of them. It’s been several months since attorneys on both sides asked the judge to set a trial date, yet Cannon has refused to put something on the calendar. And the previous start date of May 20 is impossible, given that Trump is certain to be stuck in a Manhattan courtroom until the end of the month.
If the substance sounds familiar, it may be because House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) last year launched “an inquiry into alleged prosecutorial abuses,” one of his many forays into Trump’s legal cases.
The Trump-allied congressman has repeatedly tried to run interference on the criminal prosecutions of the former president, albeit with little to show for it. Jordan’s attempts to derail the Manhattan District Attorney’s case—by trying to embarrass DA Alvin Bragg Jr. and intimidating a former prosecutor who wrote a tell-all memoir about the investigation—went nowhere, as the trial is now underway. And Jordan was torn to shreds when he tried to elbow his way into Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ investigation in Georgia.
The congressman’s misadventures haven’t worked. And it’s unclear whether Jordan’s team has received any of the documents or communications they demanded from the special counsel’s office over the August 2022 meeting. (Jordan’s team did not respond to a request for information.)
However, Cannon could very well take up the banner herself, now that she’s in a position to halt the case while she considers whether this accusation by Nauta’s lawyer is worth exploring. The stakes are higher than they might seem.
“If the prosecutor actually did that, that is very bad for the case. It could turn the prosecutor into a witness for the defense later in the case. And it could support a dismissal if it impacted the representation he got from his defense lawyer. That’s a huge problem,” said Catherine Ross, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Law School.
She noted that this accusation—albeit dubious—is far more serious than the one that just interrupted the case against Trump in Georgia. Earlier this year, Trump’s many election interference conspiracy co-defendants banded together to decry Willis’ romantic relationship with her lead prosecutor, an effort that temporarily detoured the case, earned the DA a scathing rebuke from the judge, and knocked the prosecutor off the team.
While the fling was a show of poor judgment by the DA, it does not appear to have affected the substance of the prosecution itself.
By contrast, Ross said, “this is much more serious and much more directly involved with the prosecutor in the case.”
But that doesn’t mean it needs to take a long time to resolve. Legal scholars told The Daily Beast that judges don’t often field accusations of this particular brand of legal misbehavior—and certainly not in a case of this magnitude—but there’s a tried and true method for getting through it. A judge can hold a brief evidentiary hearing, almost like a mini-trial, and demand to see actual evidence that this occurred. If there is none, the case can move on.
But Cannon is no ordinary federal judge.
Legal observers have watched aghast as she has bent over backwards to accommodate the politician who put her on the bench during his final months at the White House. Trump’s lawyers were caught judge-shopping, and the months since have shown they did so with good reason. From the start, Cannon entertained a civil challenge to the FBI search at Trump’s oceanside Mar-a-Lago mansion in South Florida and actually stopped federal agents from reviewing the classified evidence they’d seized—one that had to be quashed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
This relatively inexperienced judge’s penchant for siding with the MAGA cause has become clearer over time. She created the specter of a supposed concern for Trump’s privacy, a gross distortion of the facts that only came out due to a court screwup. Then, once the indictment came down, Trump and his co-defendants scored when the “random” judge-selection system gave her the case—only to have her severely delay the trial.
Her fitness to remain on the case was called into question last year when she tried to use her authority to probe Smith’s use of a grand jury in Washington, D.C.—far outside her district in South Florida.
In recent weeks, Cannon has sent even more signals of her sympathy to Trump.
In March, Cannon only temporarily shelved Trump’s arguments that the nation’s national security laws are “too vague” to be used against him for keeping classified records at Mar-a-Lago. Days later, she tried to corner prosecutors toying with the idea of a devastating ultimatum: eventually forcing them to choose between letting jurors see the top secret records in question or give Trump a free pass.
Then last month, Smith felt compelled to track the unhinged origin of Trump’s defense that the government records at Mar-a-Lago were “personal,” connecting the dots from a right-wing legal advocate all the way to the judge who actually considered it. Days later, Cannon deftly dodged Smith’s plan to start down a path that could get her booted from the case.
That’s why Ross doubts Cannon will handle this well.
“She can use this to delay,” Ross cautioned. “She can make a decision, wait for them to appeal it, she can say she needs a prolonged inquiry and put off the hearing for two months—which is her style. She doesn’t render decisions quickly. She could give them six weeks to have them submit affidavits she might want to see. She has a lot of discretion in how to respond to this.”
