Left: Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to the media about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Aug. 1, 2023, at an office of the Department of Justice in Washington. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)/Right: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks Tuesday April 2, 2024, at a rally in Green Bay, Wis. (AP Photo/Mike Roemer)
Following a Monday unsealing order by the judge in the Mar-a-Lago case, a series of documents shed light on the origins of Donald Trump’s claims that a top prosecutor on special counsel Jack Smith’s staff offered a “JUDGESHIP” to a lawyer representing his valet co-defendant during an August 2022 meeting.
More than anything else, the documents reveal that Trump’s judgeship offer allegation against Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s chief for Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the National Security Division who joined Smith’s team, bears little resemblance to what was actually being argued in court filings on “allegations of potential misconduct” that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has unsealed.
On June 8, 2023, the Guardian reported that Stanley Woodward, then a new attorney for Trump valet Walt Nauta, was taken aback that Bratt mentioned Woodward’s pending judicial application to the D.C. Superior Court in almost the same breath as he urged Nauta to cooperate with the government in the face of criminal exposure. The report said the meeting happened around November of 2022, but documents said the meeting took place on Aug. 24, 2022.
As it turns out, one unsealed filing shows, on June 5, 2023 — just three days before the Guardian report, which dropped on the eve of the Mar-a-Lago indictment’s unsealing — Trump was secretly litigating in D.C. to get his hands on grand jury transcripts of witness interviews, including Nauta’s and that of Mar-a-Lago property manager and co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira.
Weeks after the Espionage Act indictment, Trump withdrew the motion for disclosure and it was denied as moot, but the specter of the claims against Bratt remained. Trump had ramped up the allegations to the extreme on Truth Social on June 8, 2023 — again, the eve of his indictment’s unsealing.
He accused Bratt, without naming him, of trying to “BRIBE & INTIMIDATE A LAWYER REPRESENTING SOMEONE BEING TARGETED & HARASSED TO FALSELY ACCUSE & FABRICATE A STORY ABOUT PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP & A CRIME THAT DOESN’T EXIST.” The defense lawyer was Woodward and the client was Nauta, though the post did not name either of them.
Trump went so far as to claim that Bratt had “offered” Woodward a judgeship “IN THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION” (Note: the president appoints the judges of the D.C. Superior Court, but it is distinct from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia).
Filings from the special counsel and Woodward show the reality of the situation was drastically different than a straight-up offer of a judgeship to Woodward in exchange for Nauta’s cooperation.
Just days before Trump’s then attorneys John Rowley and Jim Trusty exited the case, they filed the motion for disclosure claiming that Bratt’s remarks in the meeting “suggested a quid pro quo or even a threat intended to cause Mr. Woodward to persuade his clients to cooperate with Mr. Bratt.”
“In other words, ‘play ball or you have no chance of becoming a judge,”” as Rowley and Trusty characterized Bratt’s words in their motion.
But yet, Jack Smith said, the allegedly untoward comments went without mention for “more than nine months,” only emerging after Trump and Nauta received target letters in May 2023.
“In the more than nine months that elapsed between the August 2022 meeting and the Disclosure Motion, Woodward himself never approached the Government or filed a claim in court arguing that any government attorney had acted improperly,” Smith said. “Because the Disclosure Motion, which was filed in a sealed grand jury matter that included only Trump and the Government, did not indicate whether Woodward endorsed its allegations, the Government, with leave from the Chief Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, provided Woodward with the relevant excerpts from the Disclosure Motion and sought his input.”
Smith, saying that the Special Counsel’s Office referred the claims to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility at Bratt’s request out of “an abundance of caution,” described Trump’s allegations as a “tale” of “ludicrous” and “implausible” proportions, riddled with “factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations.” The special counsel said it was “wholly without merit” for the defense to say that the prosecutor with three decades of experience would casually threaten to retaliate over Nauta’s possible non-cooperation by somehow torpedoing Woodward’s potential future on the D.C. Superior Court.
The special counsel then referred to Woodward’s own account of what took place during the meeting at issue in a D.C. letter to Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg dating back to June 7, 2023. While Woodward called Bratt’s words on Aug. 24, 2022 “inappropriate” and something that should be investigated further by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the defense attorney also said his defense of Nauta “was not adversely impacted by this discussion.”
Woodward recalled Bratt saying “words to the effect of ‘I wouldn’t want you to do anything to mess that up’ — referring to Mr. Woodward’s potential nomination.”
Woodward explained in a court filing of his own that he didn’t “correct” Trump’s Truth Social “narrative” about the purported judgeship offer because he fights his cases in court.
While Woodward “confirmed the general accuracy of the allegations” about what Bratt said, Nauta’s lawyer wrote that he did not want to be “formally” interviewed by the special counsel about the meeting “out of fear of becoming a witness in one or more proceedings related to defense counsel’s representation of Mr. Nauta and others.”
In summary, Trump’s former lawyers used the words “quid pro quo” in a court filing that was secret at the time to try and obtain his eventual co-defendants’ grand jury transcripts. Three days later, Trump took to Truth Social to accuse Bratt of trying to bribe Woodward with a judgeship during a meeting that happened nine months earlier, a meeting Woodward never complained about — until Trump did. On the same day Trump posted about Bratt, Jim Trusty confirmed on CNN that the former president was indicted in Florida. The next day, the indictment was unsealed and Trusty and Rowley announced their resignations.
In court, Trusty cited “irreconcilable differences.” Outside of court, he said it “has been an honor to have spent the last year defending” Trump, “and we know he will be vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administration’s partisan weaponization of the American justice system.”
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