by WorldTribune Staff, January 2, 2024
As all await the document dump of some 175 names of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates, it’s worth noting that it was Bruce Reinhart, an attorney who represented associates of Epstein, who would go on to become the federal magistrate judge who gave the go-ahead for the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
In March 2018, the West Palm Beach attorney was officially appointed as a magistrate for the U.S. District Court in South Florida.
Magistrate judges are not appointed by the president but instead are appointed by district judges. Their duties can include dealing with bond hearings, handling technical issues in civil cases and signing off on whether to authorize a search warrant.
Reinhart, who earned his law degree from University of Pennsylvania and also graduated from Princeton, worked for the Treasury Department, the public integrity section of the U.S. Department of Justice, and spent more than 11 years as an assistant United States attorney.
Reinhart represented associates of Epstein who were alleged to have assisted the wealthy pedophile in the trafficking of underage girls.
Reports note that Reinhart had previously left his position as U.S. Attorney to represent clients in Epstein’s orbit.
According to the Miami Herald, Reinhart was hired on Jan. 2, 2008, to represent accomplices of Epstein who would later go on to receive federal immunity for allegedly trafficking underage girls.
Reinhart admitted to the Miami Herald that he had represented 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 Epstein 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.
Ten months after starting work for Epstein’s co-conspirators, according to Federal Election Commission records, Reinhart gave $1,000 directly to the Obama campaign and another $1,000 to its fundraising arm, the Obama Victory Fund. Though the records show the judge made mostly small-dollar donations to his law firm’s political action committee in subsequent years, Reinhart also donated $500 to Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign in November 2015.
Reinhart was later named in a civil lawsuit by two of Epstein’s victims who accused Reinhart of violating Department of Justice policies by switching sides in the middle of the Epstein investigation, suggesting he had spilled inside information about the probe to build favor with Epstein, the Herald reported in 2018.
On Dec. 18, 2023, federal Judge Loretta Preska issued an order to go into effect 14 days later unsealing the names and court documents in connection to Prince Andrew accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s defamation case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex crimes.
Bill Clinton was identified as “Doe 36” in the documents by ABC News, and his name is reportedly among the 177 Epstein associates who are set to be publicly named with the release of records pursuant to a court ruling last month.
In an order analyzing which names should and should not be released, the judge wrote under the entry for J. Doe 036 that all related “material should be unsealed in full,” as the individual did not raise any objection to the unsealing, the person has widely been reported as an Epstein associate and their name was mentioned at Maxwell’s criminal trial.
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