The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday aimed to keep President-elect Donald Trump from intervening in the criminal case against his former co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents matter.

Technically, the extant proceedings concern Waltine “Walt” Nauta, Trump’s personal valet, and Carlos de Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s chief of maintenance, both of whom face federal charges. Those charges, however, are almost certain – and widely expected – to be dropped by the incoming Trump administration in a matter of days.

What remains is a time-limited dispute about whether or not a federal judge should allow the limited release of the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his Trump investigations.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set a hearing for Jan. 17 to deal with the remaining issues related to the report.

In something not entirely unlike an “all hands” call to action, Republican attorneys general from 20 different states are now trying to convince a federal court of appeals that the Mar-a-Lago documents indictment against Donald Trump should remain dismissed.

The 33-page amici curiae — or friends of the court — filing was submitted late Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The motion purports to represent the states of Florida, Iowa, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, And West Virginia.

In yet another iteration of a sustained legal pile-on, the brief argues special counsel Jack Smith was appointed to his position “unlawfully” — in violation of strong, time-honored executive, or presidential, authority.

“[U]nlike a U.S. Attorney, Smith faces next-to-zero presidential accountability,” the brief reads. “He was not appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Nor is he subject to the plenary supervision of an official who was.”

The battle over the dismissal of the indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents case is heating up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, as a group of conservative amici curiae, or friends of the court, on Friday argued to maintain the pro-Donald Trump status quo.

In their 35-page brief in support of the defendants, several right-wing nonprofit groups — led by 501(c)(3) America’s Future — argue that special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to his position in violation of the appointments and appropriations clauses.

“Because there was no legislation specifically creating an office of Special Counsel when the Attorney General appointed Mr. Smith on November 18, 2022, the challenged appointment must be invalidated because Congress had not established the office of Special Counsel as the Appointments Clause requires,” the filing reads.

As is often the case in the several-months-long litigation over the constitutional vitality of Smith’s appointment, the appropriations clause argument is a knock-on, or derivative, claim. To hear opponents of the special counsel’s office tell it, any spending that occurred after the unlawful appointment is, perforce, also unlawful.

On May 28, months before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution, she handed Jack Smith a loss, denying the special counsel’s request for a gag order on the former president. That same day, an unsealed federal indictment reveals, an Illinois man with a history of violent offenses allegedly threatened to murder an unnamed federal judge in St. Lucie County, Florida, a county that contains the relatively “small” Fort Pierce courthouse where Cannon and a magistrate judge sit.

Bloomberg got the scoop on the case against Eric James Rennert on Friday and reported that the victim in the case could very well be Cannon, considering she is “the only district judge” in St. Lucie County.

In yet another almost-replay of the arguments made before the lower court in Donald Trump’s long-stalled-out Mar-a-Lago case, a group of law professors, legal scholars and a public interest law firm are asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to let them file a brief as amici curiae (“friends of the court”) — on the defendant’s behalf.

On Tuesday, South Texas College of Law Professor Josh Blackman and Florida lawyer Michael Adam Sasso argued that legal scholar and Professor Seth Barrett Tillman, former prosecutor Robert W. Ray, and the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation should be allowed their say as special counsel Jack Smith looks to reanimate the prosecution.

In a motion for leave to file their brief, the attorneys say it is effectively their clients’ turn to catch the court’s ear — because two groups of pro-prosecution amici were allowed to file their own briefs late last month. And, they argue, this is not entirely unlike déjà vu: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon allowed all three groups to file briefs in the lower court case and she seriously considered each group during oral arguments.

“These amici advanced arguments that supplemented the positions taken by the Special Counsel and the Defendants,” the motion reads. “The District Court’s order cited these three amici. Now, as this case continues on appeal, assistance from amici continues. The constitutional lawyers have already filed their brief. And the Ray-Tillman-Landmark Amici now seek leave to file a brief.”

Former President Donald Trump has asked a federal appeals court sitting in Atlanta for a bit of extra time to file a motion opposing the government’s efforts to reinstate the Mar-a-Lago indictment against him and two other erstwhile, would-be co-defendants.

A lower court dismissed special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents charges against the 45th president in an early summer opinion that sent shock waves through political and legal landscapes. Also spared from the prosecution’s maw by that novel reading of the U.S. Constitution were Waltine “Walt” Nauta, Trump’s personal valet, and Carlos de Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s chief of maintenance.

On Aug. 26, as widely anticipated, Smith filed to overturn the pro-Trump decision issued by Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. Under circuit rules, Trump has 30 days to respond — which sets the present deadline to respond to Smith on Sept. 25.

On Tuesday, in a 14-page unopposed motion for extension of time to file opening brief, Trump’s attorneys asked the appeals court for another 30 days to get their affairs in order in the Mar-a-Lago case. The motion cites the still-ongoing Smith-helmed prosecution in the District of Columbia as the foremost reason for the requested delay.

The Special Counsel’s Office and Donald Trump’s defense both responded Tuesday to an order in the Mar-a-Lago case surrounding jury instructions on the Presidential Records Act (PRA), and the prosecution repeatedly hammered the former president’s arguments as “fictional,” “invented,” and “legally erroneous.”

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on March 18 caused a stir by ordering the parties to file “proposed jury instructions limited to the essential elements” of Trump’s Espionage Act charges and to “engage with” two “competing scenarios and offer alternative draft text that assumes each scenario to be a correct formulation of the law to be issued to the jury [.]”

Special counsel Jack Smith on Friday urged the federal judge overseeing the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case to enforce certain redactions on two court filings recently submitted by former President Donald Trump’s valet Waltine “Walt” Nauta.

Nauta faces charges of conspiracy to obstruct, making false statements to the FBI, and withholding documents — connected to an alleged scheme to delete Mar-a-Lago camera footage and conceal boxes of classified documents from a grand jury. In reply briefs, he argued the indictment should be thrown out because he was singled out via vindictive prosecution and impermissibly retaliated against via prosecution because he declined to testify in front of a grand jury.

On Wednesday, Smith’s office addressed several alleged substantive and procedural deficiencies in Nauta’s arguments, categorizing them as “deeply flawed” and “meritless” and simply filed too late.

The government’s Friday filing asks U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to intervene in a dispute over whether Nauta can publicize the names of potential government witnesses and other information.

The special counsel can “redact, substitute, or delete” two categories of classified information and “most” of a third category from shareable discovery, the judge in former President Donald Trump’s Espionage Act prosecution ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon wrote that Jack Smith’s motions prevailed as far as categories 3 and 4 are concerned — the first dealing with “documents relating to a potential government witness” and the second with “classified information which the Special Counsel seeks to delete from discovery in its entirety.”

Cannon also granted “most of the Category 2 requests,” but not all.

“Category 2 contains a subset of After-Action Reports (‘AARs’) and related emails from which the Special Counsel seeks to redact limited words and phrases,” she wrote. “The vast majority of the requests are not topically related to the charged documents and thus neither relevant nor helpful to the defense. A very limited number of redaction requests, however, cannot be resolved at this stage.”

The government witness known in court documents as “Trump Employee 5” and now known publicly to be longtime former Mar-a-Lago valet Brian Butler shed more light on what went on behind closed doors when he sat for interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office and testified before the grand jury that went on to indict the former president.

Revealing that he met with special counsel Jack Smith’s office up to five times over a period of months, Butler told NBC News that the grand jury setting was a “dark” closet-like room filled with roughly 20 grand jurors. Prosecutors “were interested in everything” he had to say during interviews, Butler added.

That may not have been the case for at least one of the grand jurors, however. Butler said he “could see their eyes shut.”

Butler also appeared Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber,” where he revealed that he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but will not do so in 2024.

The erstwhile Mar-a-Lago employee of two decades, as he said in his first public interview with CNN, stated his belief that Trump wanted surveillance video deleted because he knew he wasn’t supposed to have national defense information and knew that the Presidential Records Act didn’t protect him.

“The way I see it, if these were his personal documents or he’s allowed to have these by the PRA, why would you need to ask questions about video footage?” Butler asked. “Why would you possibly move the documents when they are coming to retrieve them. To me, it just doesn’t make any sense. On top of that, why would you put two low-level employees in the position they’re in if he you did nothing wrong and these were your personal documents?”

Pressed as to whether he had witnessed “part of a cover-up,” Butler said: “I think it’s very possible.”

“From what I saw, the questions — why would they ask about video footage, how long it’s deleted for?” Butler asked. “Those are conversations Carlos [De Oliveira] told me he was asked with finding out prior to Walt [Nauta]’s arrival on a secret trip.”

Here, Butler was recounting the details as they appeared in the indictment.

Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira on June 25, 2022, allegedly told Trump Employee 5 that valet Walt Nauta was en route from Bedminster, N.J., to Mar-a-Lago but asked the witness not to tell anyone about the “secret” trip that related to surveillance camera footage.

“DE OLIVEIRA also told Trump Employee 5 that NAUTA wanted DE OLIVEIRA to talk to Trump Employee 4 to see how long camera footage was stored,” the indictment said. “Shortly after arriving in Palm Beach on the evening of June 25, NAUTA went to The Mar-a-Lago Club and met with DE OLIVEIRA at 5:46 p.m. At The Mar-a-Lago Club, NAUTA and DE OLIVEIRA went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

Two days later, De Oliveira told another employee — “Trump Employee 4” — that “the boss” wanted the video footage server deleted, the indictment further alleged.

On CNN, Butler recalled helping Nauta load boxes of documents onto a Trump plane headed for New Jersey, documents the witness said he later realized “were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes.” Before he left Trump’s employ and became a witness for the prosecution, Butler counted De Oliveira as one of his “best friends.” Now, he said, they don’t talk anymore.

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