The Justice Department on Wednesday dropped charges in two criminal cases that President Donald Trump criticized as political, one related to the FBI raid of his Florida residence Mar-a-Lago and one against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. The DOJ filed a one-page memo in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to end the federal case against Fortenberry on charges he lied to federal authorities who were investigating illegal contributions to his 2016 reelection campaign. Fortenberry represented Nebraska until resigning in 2022 following an initial conviction in a jury trial in California. That conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in a ruling that said the case instead should have been filed in Nebraska or Washington, D.C. The Justice Department indicted Fortenberry again last year, and he was scheduled to face a second jury trial in July. Fortenberry had argued for a delay in the trial, writing in a court filing after Trump’s victory that the case was politicized and that the incoming Trump administration would likely “reexamine” it. In a social media post Wednesday, Trump praised the decision to drop the “Witch Hunt” against Fortenberry, linking it to his criticism of the “weaponization” of the DOJ against conservatives. “Jeff and his family were forced to suffer greatly due to the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats,” Trump said. A spokesman for the DOJ declined to comment beyond the court filings, including when asked whether the department stood by its initial indictments. The DOJ also moved Wednesday to drop charges against Trump’s former co-defendants in a Florida case, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveria. Special counsel John L. “Jack” Smith charged them in 2023 as part of a superseding indictment in his broader case accusing Trump of illegally keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club after leaving office. Nauta, a Trump aide, was accused of helping move boxes containing classified information around the club to keep them from being searched in response to a federal government subpoena, according to the indictment. The indictment also accused De Oliveira, then the property manager at the club, of working with Nauta to orchestrate the deletion of video footage from inside the club. The indictment accused Nauta of conspiring to withhold a record from a government subpoena, concealing a record, making false statements and altering or destroying the object of an investigation; and De Oliveira of altering or destroying the object of an investigation and making false statements. The charges were initially dismissed against Trump, Nauta and De Oliveira last year when Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed. Smith had appealed that ruling. But Smith dismissed the case against Trump after the presidential election, citing a DOJ policy that sitting presidents cannot face prosecution. Democrats are likely to cite the dismissal of the Florida charges to urge the release of the second portion of Smith’s report on his investigations — an unlikely prospect in the Trump administration. In a flurry of court filings prior to Trump’s inauguration, then-Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said he would not release the report while the cases against Nauta and De Oliveira were pending. On Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., and Senate Democrats issued a letter calling for the Justice Department to release the report so they could consider the portion dealing with FBI nominee Kash Patel, who testified in the probe. Patel’s confirmation hearing is set for Thursday. “In order to discharge their constitutional duty, the Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee must therefore be fully and accurately informed about Mr. Patel’s record,” the letter said. Prior to Trump’s inauguration, House Judiciary panel ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., called on Garland to drop the cases against Nauta and De Oliveira so that the report could be released.
