U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon ruled in favor of special counsel Jack Smith’s request to hide the names of witnesses involved in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case.
The decision marks the end of a monthslong saga after Smith argued that the release of the names could expose them to danger. The identities of many witnesses would have been revealed if Trump was cleared to attach discovery evidence about the witnesses on the public court docket.
“That discovery material, if publicly docketed in unredacted form as the Court has ordered, would disclose the identities of numerous potential witnesses, along with the substance of the statements they made to the FBI or the grand jury, exposing them to significant and immediate risks of threats, intimidation, and harassment,” prosecutors argued in a 22-page February filing.
The witnesses Smith has been seeking to protect include FBI agents, Secret Service agents, and others.
Though siding with Smith, Cannon also criticized him in her 24-page ruling, obtained by the Washington Post.
“Although the Special Counsel’s request remains sweeping in nature as applied to all potential government witnesses without differentiation … the Court is satisfied that the Special Counsel has made an adequate showing on this issue” for now, Cannon wrote.
However, elsewhere in the ruling, she criticized the special counsel for an inadequate response to a group of press outlets looking to make all the information in the case public.
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“The Special Counsel’s response did not object to the Press Coalition’s invocation of First Amendment principles, did not meaningfully engage with any of the legal standards, and did not offer any additional factual support,” Cannon wrote.
The next move in the case is to decide the trial date. Smith’s team has urged it to begin as soon as possible, while Trump’s team seeks to push it back.
