The summons given to former President Donald Trump and his legal team late Thursday indicates that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon will be assigned to oversee his case, at least initially, according to reports.
According to the sources, in addition to Cannon, Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart’s name was also listed on the summons that was delivered to Trump on Thursday.
The case against Trump is also familiar to Reinhart, who took the oath of office as a magistrate judge in 2018. He approved the initial search warrant of Mar-a-Lago last year and later decided to unseal the search affidavit, choices that led to him becoming the victim of antisemitic slurs online.
The majority of federal cases assign judges at random. But according to analysts, the apparent allusions to Cannon and Reinhart on Trump’s summons may actually represent the fact that both have already participated in the proceedings.
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Reinhart received his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton, and he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a law degree.
He is married to Circuit Judge Carolyn Bell, who was appointed by former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican who is now a US Senator for Florida, the same week he was sworn in as a magistrate judge, according to Bell’s bio through the Palm Beach Bar Association. The couple has two kids together.
He formerly held positions as a senior policy advisor at the Department of Justice and as a trial lawyer in the Public Integrity Section of the US Treasury.
Up until 2008, he also served as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
Reinhart worked on the prosecution of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who is now deceased, while serving as a federal prosecutor.
He left the US Attorney’s office in the middle of the case, however, and began to represent a number of Epstein’s workers. The New York Post said that he later came under fire from a number of Epstein’s accusers who claimed he had shared information with Epstein’s legal team during the transfer. He refuted the charges.
