Overview [1]

Born in New Jersey in 1962, Bruce Reinhart grew up in the Central Jersey borough of Somerville. He earned an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Princeton University in 1984, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1987.

Reinhart then began his legal career as a law clerk for Judge Norma L. Shapiro of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

From 1988-1994, Reinhart worked as a federal prosecutor for the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division. He subsequently served as a policy advisor for the United States Treasury Department from 1994-1996.

In 1996 Reinhart became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in West Palm Beach, Florida, a position he would hold until he abruptly resigned on January 1, 2008.

Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

On January 2, 2008 — the day after he stepped down from his post as Assistant U.S. Attorney — Reinhart entered private practice and began serving as a defense lawyer representing several employees of Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous financier and sex-trafficker. Among Reinhart’s clients were: (a) Epstein’s pilots; (b) one of Epstein’s schedulers, Sarah Kellen, who, according to police records, scheduled underage girls to visit Epstein on a regular basis; and (c) a Yugoslavian woman named Nadia Marcinkova, who frequently piloted Epstein’s airplane Lolita Express and has been described by some of Epstein’s sexual-exploitation victims as his sex slave.

In court filings related to a 2011 civil lawsuit, the attorneys for two of Epstein’s victims accused Judge Reinhart of having violated Justice Department policies by representing the aforementioned Epstein employees. As The New York Times reported: “[L]awyers for Mr. Epstein’s victims accused Mr. Reinhart of violating Florida bar rules. His involvement ‘gave the appearance’ of currying favor with Mr. Epstein while working at the Justice Department in order to [later] reap rewards with lucrative employment” as a defense attorney for Epstein’s employees.

In response to that charge, Reinhart in 2011 said in a sworn affidavit that, during his tenure as an Assistant U.S. Attorney: (a) he had not participated in his office’s investigation of Epstein, and (b) he therefore had not acquired any confidential information regarding Epstein that he could now exploit in his role as a defense lawyer.

But according to the Miami Herald: “[T]wo years later [in 2013], 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 2017, Judge Reinhart reiterated his claim that he had no memory of ever having learned anything substantive about Epstein’s criminal case during his years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in West Palm Beach. “Even assuming I had participated ‘personally and substantially’ in the Epstein investigation [which I did not],” he said, “the relevant Department of Justice regulations only prohibited me from communicating with, or appearing before, the United States on behalf of Mr. Epstein.”

Magistrate Judge

In March 2018, Reinhart was appointed to serve as a magistrate judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. (Magistrate judges generally attain their positions by way of a majority vote of the active district judges of a given federal District Court.) Reinhart continues to hold this Florida position, for which his current term will expire on March 18, 2034.

Approving the FBI Raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home

On August 5, 2022, FBI agents as well as federal prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department’s National Security Division:

• presented Judge Reinhart with a sealed affidavit detailing why America’s Joe Biden-led government believed that Donald Trump, when his term as President ended in January 2021, had unlawfully removed from the White House a number of classified documents and transported them to Mar-a-Lago, his sprawling residential estate in Palm Beach, Florida; and
• tried to persuade Reinhart to sign off on a warrant authorizing an FBI search of the Mar-a-Lago premises. (U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland was likewise on board with the idea of applying for a federal court-authorized search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.)

Judge Reinhart approved and signed the Mar-a-Lago search warrant on August 5, 2022. As The New York Times explained:

“The warrant said the agents would be searching for material as they investigated potential violations of the Espionage Act, which outlaws the unauthorized retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary…. It also cited a federal law that makes it a crime to destroy or conceal a document to obstruct a government investigation, and another statute that bars the unlawful taking or destruction of government records or documents.”

Internal FBI Doubts about the Propriety of a Raid on Mar-a-Lago

Notably, internal FBI emails from August 2022 – communications that would eventually be declassified in December 2025 — showed that a number of U.S. officials doubted that there was enough probable cause to justify an FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. According to Fox News, for instance, one FBI official wrote to another: “Very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling the documents. WFO [the FBI’s Washington Field Office] has been drafting a search warrant affidavit related to these potential boxes, but has some concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated.”

Weeks later, an FBI agent wrote an email saying:

• “We haven’t generated any new facts, but keep being given draft after draft after draft.”
• “Absent a witness coming forward with recent information about classified on site, at what point is it fair to table this? It is time consuming for the team, and not productive if there are no new facts supporting PC [probable cause]?”

Moreover, yet another email indicated that the FBI’s Washington Field Office did “not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago.”

In spite of the foregoing expressions of doubt regarding allegations that Mr. Trump may have violated the law, approximately 30 FBI agents – equipped with concealed weapons, bolt cutters, and handcuffs, and accompanied by a medic in case of injuries that might be sustained in a physical conflict — raided Mar-a-Lago and searched for classified documents and presidential records that had been taken from the White House. All told, the agents seized 33 boxes in which 102 classified items — and more than 11,000 unclassified items — were contained.

Condemnations of the FBI Raid on Mar-a-Lago

Former President Trump repeatedly claimed that he had issued a “standing order” declassifying any classified documents immediately upon their removal from the White House, thereby rendering the raid an exercise in meaninglessness.

According to documents that the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) obtained from the National Archives, President Biden’s administration (2021-2025), in coordination with the Department of Justice (DOJ), had issued a “special access request” authorizing the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the seizure of the documents. But “the special access statute authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House,” AFLF explained. “Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House.”

Reed D. Rubinstein, Director of Oversight and Investigations for AFLF, said in a statement: “The evidence … suggests that Biden officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice unlawfully abused their power and then lied about it to the American people. This government, it seems, acknowledges no limits on its power to harass, intimidate, and silence its political opponents.”

On August 8, 2022, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz condemned the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, saying: “I just hope this raid has a justification. If it doesn’t have a justification, the material seized in it will be suppressed. … The law is clear: you don’t engage in a raid unless you’ve exhausted all of the other remedies. … Raids are not a first recourse in America. They’re a last recourse. And so the government will have to show a court, eventually, that they exhausted all other possibilities or they had a reasonable basis for believing that the evidence would be destroyed if it was sought in the normal legal course of events, through subpoena.”

In an August 12, 2022 op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal, former White House and DOJ lawyers David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey stated that the Presidential Records Act of 1978 permitted Trump to be in possession of the records in question, and that “the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.”

How the Mar-a-Lago Case Played Out

After Attorney General Merrick Garland declared there was “substantial public interest in this matter,” Judge Reinhart, in accordance with a DOJ request, unsealed the Mar-a-Lago warrant and property receipt on August 12, 2022. Trump, for his part, posted on his Truth Social platform: “Not only will I not oppose the release of documents … I am going a step further by ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents.” (Emphasis in original)

On June 8, 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith – who had been appointed to that position by Attorney General Garland — slapped President Trump with 37 felony charges related to his allegedly improper handling of classified materials, thereby making Trump the first former president in American history to be federally indicted. As The New York Times reported: “The charges against [Trump] include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements, and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

On June 13, 2023, Trump appeared before Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman to surrender to federal custody in the U.S. District Court of South Florida, where he was arrested, booked, processed, and arraigned. He pleaded “not guilty” to all 37 felony charges.

On July 15, 2024, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon – a Trump appointee — dismissed the classified-documents case against Trump because the manner in which special counsel Jack Smith had been appointed was unlawful. “The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution,” wrote Cannon, explaining that the Constitution authorizes only Congress or the President – and not the U.S. Attorney General — to appoint a special counsel.

Though Special Counsel Smith initially appealed Judge Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case, he subsequently dropped his appeal following Trump’s election to a second term as President in November 2024. Smith then resigned on January 10, 2025, just ten days before Trump was officially sworn into office to begin his second term.

Reinhart’s Political Donations

Over the years, Reinhart has made monetary donations to members of both major political parties. According to Politico:

“Federal campaign finance records show that Reinhart in 2008 donated $1,000 to President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee. He had also donated $500 to former Florida Republican Gov Jeb Bush in 2016 when he was running for president.

“State records show that over several election cycles, Reinhart donated $4,550 to a handful of candidates, including [Dave] Aronberg [a Democrat State Attorney of Palm Beach County] as well as candidates running for judge, state attorney, public defender and a Democrat who ran for the Florida House.”

Footnotes:

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Bruce_Reinhart
https://www.flsd.uscourts.gov/content/judge-bruce-e-reinhart
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/us/politics/judge-bruce-reinhart-trump-mar-a-lago.html
https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/bruce-reinhart-judge-center-of-justice-dept-inquiry-into-trump-classified-records/101-01f9f9ce-a7fb-427c-a93c-c138e54a0cfa