Inset: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida). Background: An aerial view of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 31, 2022 (AP Photo/Steve Helber/File).
In reply to both the U.S. Department of Justice and President Donald Trump’s personal attorneys, a group of fired Mar-a-Lago FBI agents on Friday urged U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to make a “simple” and “straightforward” tweak to her order that would fix the government’s “self-created problems.”
Law&Crime has previously reported how “former defendants” Trump, his valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira and the DOJ are in lockstep in supporting the Trump-appointed judge’s “great care” in burying Volume II of ex-special counsel Jack Smith’s final report.
Cannon dismissed Trump’s Espionage Act indictment in July 2024, reasoning that all of “private citizen” Smith’s acts were invalidated as a consequence of an unlawful appointment as special counsel.
Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.
One of those acts was the creation of Volume II.
So Cannon blocked the DOJ and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “or her successor(s)” from “releasing, sharing, or transmitting Volume II of the Final Report or any drafts of Volume II outside the Department of Justice” or “otherwise releasing, distributing, conveying, or sharing with anyone outside the Department of Justice any information or conclusions in Volume II or in drafts thereof.”
FBI agents, many of whom were “abruptly and unlawfully fired” by FBI Director Kash Patel after his return from the Olympic Games, have said that they want to testify in the DOJ’s “grand conspiracy” probe and that the contents of Volume II might come up — leaving them exposed to legal peril.
Those professed “experts in the handling of classified information” say they could face “court-imposed sanctions” for which they “could be held in contempt” unless Cannon clarified her order barring all disclosures about Volume II.
That dilemma can easily be solved if Cannon says that “when individuals leave DOJ, they are no longer covered by the Order,” the agents stated in a 14-page reply.
“An interpretation that Clients are no longer members of any of the categories of personnel covered is as simple as it is obvious. It would also untangle DOJ’s own tortured interpretation that the Order broadly prohibits disclosure by individuals who are no longer in any category of personnel addressed by the Order,” the fired agents said. “The Court does not have to reinvent the language of its prior Order here just to extract DOJ from a problem of its own making.”
“The proposed textual interpretation of the Order would meet all forms of relief requested by Clients,” court documents went on. “But perhaps more important, it would mean that DOJ will have to solve its own self-created problems. Not Clients, and not the Court.”
Trump and the DOJ have maintained that there is nothing for Cannon to clarify in her order and that the agents are just trying to put “improperly derived information” in the public sphere.
“Absent the breadth of this Court’s February 23 Order, nearly anyone involved in the underlying criminal investigation and prosecution or otherwise having knowledge of Volume II could feign a right to speak freely,” the filing said.
The post Fired Mar-a-Lago agents beg Judge Cannon for ‘one straightforward ruling’ to solve Trump DOJ’s ‘self-created problems’ first appeared on Law & Crime.
