MIAMI — A week ago, the FBI submitted a search warrant seeking classified information in the Mar-a-Lago home of former president Donald Trump to a magistrate judge in West Palm Beach federal court.
But the magistrate judge on duty last Friday wasn’t available, so another one agreed to review it, with no idea of what awaited him.
His name is Bruce Reinhart, a former federal prosecutor who was appointed to the position in 2018. When he found “probable cause” of a crime allowing FBI agents to search Trump’s private club for “top secret” and other classified documents, it was a pretty routine process — despite authorizing the unprecedented search of a former president’s residence.
“It doesn’t matter one lick who the magistrate judge is,” said a federal law enforcement official in South Florida. “If there’s probable cause, there’s probable cause, and the magistrate will sign the warrant.”
But, this was a warrant targeting Trump, a typhoon-like figure twice impeached as president who immediately lashed out at the Justice Department and FBI for their latest investigation into his political activities while calling attention to the search at his opulent residence. It was only a matter of time before Reinhart, a 59-year-old, Ivy League-educated lawyer born in New Jersey, would become the target of extremist threats and character smears. The judge could not be reached for comment.
There have been antisemitic slurs on right-wing social media platforms and message boards, where users have published the judge’s name, address and personal information. Threats have been directed at Reinhart, who appears to be a member of the board of Temple Beth David in Palm Beach Gardens, as well as his family members.
Some have attacked Reinhart for defending former employees of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2008, after Reinhart had worked for a decade as a federal prosecutor in West Palm Beach.
Others have pointed to Reinhart’s critical comments about Trump posted in 2017 on what appears to be his personal Facebook account, as Republicans question Reinhart’s impartiality and motives.
“They found some Obama donor judge, not even a judge, a magistrate, to give them the search warrant,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said on Fox News the day after the raid. The Miami Republican asserted that federal authorities used the classified-information search as a “ruse” to dig up documents on Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol before he left office.
It is true that Reinhart donated $1,000 to Barack Obama’s campaign just before the Democratic senator was elected president in November 2008, according to OpenSecrets.org. But records show Reinhart also contributed $500 to former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush’s campaign for president in 2015, when Bush, Rubio, Trump and other GOP candidates were vying for the party’s nomination.
The Epstein case
According to court and public records, Reinhart served for 11 years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, from 1996 to 2007. He prosecuted “the full spectrum” of federal crimes, from narcotics to public corruption to financial frauds, and also served as a supervisor.
When he went into private practice as a defense lawyer in West Palm Beach in early 2008, Reinhart’s first big clients were suspected accomplices of Epstein, the wealthy New York financier, who owned a mansion in Palm Beach and had been under investigation by federal prosecutors for allegations of sex-trafficking underage girls.
Reinhart’s defense work in that scandalous case, highlighted by the Miami Herald a decade later, would become further fodder for social media critics of his approval of the FBI search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. On Thursday, Fox News’ most popular program broadcast a meme created from a picture of Epstein on his private jet, with an image lifted from Reinhart’s Facebook page of the judge’s torso superimposed over Epstein’s body.
In a 2011 sworn affidavit submitted in a civil case brought by Epstein’s victims, Reinhart denied he did anything unethical or improper as a former federal prosecutor, saying he was not part of the team involved in Epstein’s investigation and therefore was not privy to any confidential information about the case. But then, Reinhart’s former supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a court paper contradicting him, saying that “while Bruce E. Reinhart was an assistant U.S. attorney, he learned confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter.’’
In response to a request for comment from the Herald in 2018, Reinhart said that he didn’t recall learning anything about Epstein’s criminal case.
“Even assuming I had participated ‘personally and substantially’ in the Epstein investigation (which I did not), the relevant Department of Justice regulations only prohibited me from communicating with, or appearing before, the United States on behalf of Mr. Epstein,’’ he said in an email, noting that while he represented a number of Epstein’s employees, he did not represent Epstein.
Despite the notoriety of the case — Epstein eventually pleaded guilty to state charges on soliciting minors for sex — the fallout did not affect Reinhart’s legal career.
Reinhart the magistrate judge
In March 2018, he was chosen as a magistrate judge by the U.S. district court judges in the Southern District Court of Florida after they reviewed 64 applicants and interviewed 15 candidates. The judges recognized his education, with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as his experience as a former federal prosecutor and trial attorney.
As a magistrate judge, Reinhart handles arraignments, detentions, pre-trial criminal and civil motions, and other litigation matters in coordination with the district court judges.
One of his recent civil cases that has been spotlighted by news media outlets and right-wing critics is Trump’s racketeering lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton and others. The suit accuses them of instigating a Justice Department investigation into allegations of Russian collaborations with his campaign during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Without explanation, Reinhart recused himself as the magistrate judge in that case in June 2022 — two months after another magistrate, Ryon McCabe, had removed himself as well. The case has now been reassigned to William Matthewman, the magistrate who was on duty last week but unavailable to review the FBI search warrant for Trump’s residence in Palm Beach.
Several former federal prosecutors in South Florida say they understand the nature of the incendiary social media attacks on Reinhart because of the Trump connection, but they also view them as cheap shots because he’s just doing his job as a magistrate judge.
Mark Schnapp, a longtime Miami defense attorney who had worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s in the 1980s and 1990s, scoffed at Rubio’s description of Reinhart as “some Obama donor judge.”
“The Department of Justice sought a warrant from an independent and, in this case, well-respected magistrate judge,” Schnapp said. “Either [Rubio] does not understand or respect the process.”
Miami defense lawyer David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor who headed the corruption and national security sections in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, concurred.
“Whichever magistrate judge was handed this assignment would have done the very same thing,” Weinstein said, citing an evaluation of the existence of probable cause for a particular crime, a list of items to be seized as evidence and the areas of the search.
“Despite allegations to the contrary,” he said, “partisan politics play no part in the justice system.”
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