Judge Bruce E Reinhart, one of three federal magistrates in West Palm Beach who signed the unprecedented warrant authorizing the Federal Investigation Bureau (FBI) to raid former president Donald Trump’s Mar-e-Lago home is a former criminal defense attorney and is accused of keeping mistresses on payroll. Prior to becoming a judge in 2018, Reinhart spent 12 years as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the office tasked with investigating the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for sex trafficking in 2005.
The New York Post quoted sources that said US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart — ironically enough nominated to his post in 2018 by then-President Trump — signed off on the FBI’s warrant to search the former president’s palatial home in South Florida in what he said was an “unannounced raid on my home”.
The New York Post adds:
Reinhart was elevated to magistrate judge in March 2018 after 10 years in private practice. That November, the Miami Herald reported that he had represented several of Epstein’s employees — including, by Reinhart’s own admission to the outlet, Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, who Epstein once reportedly described as his “Yugoslavian sex slave”.
Kellen and Marcinkova were among Epstein’s lieutenants who were granted immunity as part of a controversial 2007 deal with federal prosecutors that allowed the pervert to plead guilty to state charges rather than federal crimes. Epstein wound up serving just 13 months in county jail and was granted work release.
According to the outlet, Reinhart resigned from the South Florida US Attorney’s Office effective on New Year’s Day 2008 and went to work for Epstein’s cohorts the following day. Epstein, who was found dead in August 2019 of an apparent suicide in the Manhattan Correctional Center while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, had hired a stable of high-powered lawyers, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
According to the Herald in 2018, the judge was later identified in a civil lawsuit accusing him of violating DOJ policies by changing sides during the Epstein investigation. The paper went on to suggest that Reinhart used insider information regarding the investigation in order to gain favor with Epstein.
Reinhart denied that he had done anything wrong in a 2011 affidavit while going on to claim that since he did not get involved in any federal probe of Epstein, he, therefore, had no access to any inside information regarding the case.
But in a 2013 court filing, former colleagues of his contradicted that claim, saying that he had “learned confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter.” In a response to the Miami paper, Reinhart said a complaint filed against him by an attorney for Epstein’s victims was summarily dismissed by the Department of Justice.
According to his official biography for his dozen years serving as a federal prosecutor, Reinhart “managed a docket that covered the full spectrum of federal crimes, including narcotics, violent crimes, public corruption, financial frauds, child pornography, and immigration”.
Reinhart’s involvement in issuing Trump’s warrant is drawing widespread condemnation.
“Not only did Reinhart make an ethically questionable move from prosecuting Epstein and his accomplices to representing them, but according to FEC records, Reinhart donated US$1,000 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and another US$1,000 to a pro-Obama PAC in 2008”, PJ Media’s Matt Margolis noted on Tuesday.
“So, aside from the blatant abuse of power by the Biden administration, an Epstein-linked Obama donor approved the warrant authorizing the raid on Trump’s home”, he added.
In an appearance on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight”, Lara Trump, wife of Eric Trump, talked about the long-term implications of the raid Monday evening.
“If this is what they’re able to do to the former president of the United States, think about what they could do to you, to anybody in America”, she told guest host Will Cain. “The bottom line here is that these documents that have been in question have been – everybody’s cooperating, everybody from my father-in-law’s team – has been cooperating with the FBI with any authority that asks for anything up until now.
“There was no need to make such a big scene, to do something this insane, quite frankly, to a former president”, she added. “I think everybody clearly knows what’s going on here, Will. This is about weaponizing the justice system as it has been so many times in the past against somebody who you politically do not like”.
