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Valet Walt Nauta hands former President Donald Trump an umbrella before he speaks at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Thursday, Aug. 3, 2023, in Arlington, Va., after facing a judge on federal conspiracy charges that allege he conspired to subvert the 2020 election. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The special counsel on Wednesday was frustrated that he had to “again set the record straight” after Donald Trump’s valet and co-defendant lodged “more baseless accusations of prosecutorial misconduct” in a days-old response that is still hidden from the Mar-a-Lago docket.
On April 9, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon reversed herself on the issue of naming government witnesses, necessitating some redactions in filings related to Walt Nauta’s motion to compel discovery and more.
According to Smith, the prosecution filed a motion for redactions on April 18 and Nauta’s defense responded the next day agreeing to the special counsel’s proposal, only to inject more claims of “prosecutorial misconduct” into the case. But the docket entries for Smith’s motion and Nauta’s counter — nos. 464 and 468, respectively — as of Wednesday afternoon do not appear in the federal court database.
The special counsel said Wednesday that the dispute relates to the prosecution’s April 16 ask of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for “permission to disclose” to Cannon “in a non-public filing an October 2022 minute order issued by the D.C. court that was directly relevant to the matters before this Court.” That year-and-a-half-old minute order stemmed from a grand jury matter in D.C. that Smith says Nauta’s lawyer Stanley Woodward represented an “interested party” in.
Smith is now accusing the defense of “recasting,” in an “entirely unwarranted” manner, a “benign sequence of events” as proof of “prosecutorial misconduct.”
The special counsel said that he filed the request in D.C. asking permission to disclose a sealed grand jury-related order in the Mar-a-Lago case simply because D.C. was where the grand jury was located. He said Woodward “wrongly suggests that the Government failed to provide an interested party an opportunity to be heard,” especially considering that prosecutors served their D.C. petition on Woodward — rather than going to the D.C. court to file the petition in secret.
“Although the Government could have filed its petition ex parte,” Smith said, “the Government chose not to do so.”
The special counsel reiterated that “there was no need” under the law for the court in the nation’s capital to hear from Woodward before deciding whether the secret grand jury minute order could be shared with Cannon by email.
“In sum, because the Government was seeking permission from the D.C. court to disclose to this Court in an email filing information from a sealed D.C. court minute order, there was no need for the D.C. court to hear anything from the other parties on disclosure, nor was there anything for the D.C. court to transfer pursuant to Rule 6(e)(3)(G),” Smith said.
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