The federal judge who signed off on the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s home Mar-a-Lago on Monday quit his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in South Florida in 2008 after he was hired by convicted pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to represent his employees.
Bruce Reinhart, now U.S. magistrate judge for the Southern District of South Florida, recently authorized a sealed search warrant likely used by the FBI to target Trump with an “unannounced raid,” according to a new report from the New York Post.
Before Reinhart became a judge in 2018, he spent 10 years in private practice “focused on white collar criminal defense and complex civil litigation.” It was during those years that Reinhart represented Epstein’s pilots, scheduler Sarah Kellen, and a woman named Nadia Marcinkova, who was often referred to as Epstein’s “Yugoslavian sex slave.” During that time, Reinhart officed in the same suite where Epstein’s criminal defense lawyer Jack Goldberger worked.
In 2011, just three years after he abandoned the U.S. attorney’s office to work for Epstein’s staff and the same year multiple girls claimed Epstein shopped them out for sex with his friends including his attorney Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew, Reinhart was named in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit which suggested he disclosed private information he knew about the investigation into Epstein to his new employer.
Despite the fact that, as an assistant U.S. attorney, Reinhart did oversee “federal crimes, including narcotics, violent crimes, public corruption, financial frauds, child pornography and immigration,” he denied the accusation. Reinhart’s former employer, the U.S. attorney’s office, did not buy the claims that he “never learned any confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter” and said court papers confirm that Reinhart “did possess confidential information about the case.”