Remember Judge Cannon? Well, She’s Back
Put yourself in the shoes of an FBI agent. In August 2022, you helped carry out a court approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. This February the FBI director fired you, and this week a grand jury subpoena landed in your hands ordering you to Fort Pierce, Florida, where prosecutors want you to explain your work to a probe built on the theory your old investigation was part of a conspiracy against Donald Trump.
Now add one more problem. A federal judge has an order on the books restricting the release of the exact information the grand jury wants out of your mouth. Talk freely, and you risk contempt of court. Hold back or plead the Fifth Amendment, and you risk trouble with the grand jury.
Welcome to the trap sitting on Judge Aileen Cannon’s docket.
This is Trump’s retribution campaign up close, and you deserve to see how the machinery works.
What the Agents Asked the Judge
On Thursday, a group of current and former FBI agents and analysts from the Mar-a-Lago investigation asked Judge Cannon to clarify her February 23 order. Abbe Lowell and Mark Zaid, two prominent Washington lawyers, sit on their legal team. Most of these agents no longer work for the government. See the motion.1
They want the judge to confirm they are allowed to talk about nonpublic details of their work with people outside the Justice Department. The grand jury sits at the top of that list, and their own lawyers come right after.
Their argument rests on the plain words of the order. Cannon barred DOJ from sharing Volume II of Jack Smith’s final report, or any conclusions from the volume, with anyone outside the Department. Grand jurors sit outside the Department. So do defense lawyers.2
The motion also pulls back the curtain on how the government came calling. Agents from the FBI’s Miami field office reached out in July and August asking for voluntary interviews, and they told the lawyers grand jury testimony would follow. Handed to two of the agents on Monday were subpoenas.
Then comes the line worth reading twice, the one where the agents tell the judge that if she frees them from her order, they will walk into the grand jury room and give a detailed account of the investigation, starting from the first referral to the FBI and running all the way through the execution of the search warrant. Read that again.
The Road to Fort Pierce
Rewind to July 2024. Judge Cannon threw out the classified documents case against Trump, ruling Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel unconstitutional. Smith appealed, then dropped the appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. His team kept working on the final report, and Volume II covered the Mar-a-Lago case. In January 2025, Cannon blocked DOJ from sharing Volume II with Congress. On February 23 of this year, she made that block permanent with a 15 page order barring the Attorney General and any successor from releasing or sharing the volume outside the Department. She wrote that release would offend basic fairness, and she pointed to a June 2023 protective order covering discovery in the case. The Justice Department under Pam Bondi, attorney general at the time, agreed Volume II should stay sealed.3
In a separate move later that same week, FBI Director Kash Patel fired at least 10 employees from the documents investigation after reports surfaced about the probe obtaining phone records tied to Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and more firings followed the next day. The FBI Agents Association called the terminations unlawful. Keep that in your back pocket.
Meanwhile, a second story took shape. DOJ opened what Trump allies call the “grand conspiracy” investigation, a probe into whether officials who investigated Trump conspired to deprive him of his civil rights. Bondi directed prosecutors to take the case to a grand jury. To Fort Pierce the Department took the probe, into the courthouse where Cannon sits, a move lawyers for former CIA Director John Brennan call judge shopping.
Joe diGenova came out of retirement and took over the effort and resigned on September 10. He walked away after five months without charging a single case. Current Attorney General Todd Blanche says the probe will keep going anyway.
Five months without a single charge speaks louder than any press release the Justice Department puts out. Brennan now holds a subpoena to appear before the Fort Pierce grand jury on October 15. Some of the Mar-a-Lago agents hold subpoenas of their own.4
One Order, Two Readings
Here is where the motion draws blood. Before Jack Smith testified to Congress, DOJ lawyers warned his attorneys that discussing nonpublic Volume II material would violate Cannon’s order. The agents asked DOJ for a copy of that opinion, and DOJ refused to hand it over. When the agents’ lawyers asked how the grand jury probe fits with Cannon’s order, DOJ answered with one line: the probe’s work does not disturb the order.
The motion makes the point plainly. When a broad reading of the order serves DOJ, DOJ reads the order broadly.
Think about what that means for you as a citizen, because the same Justice Department that stretched this order wide enough to cover a special counsel’s testimony before Congress now tells the country a grand jury probe of Trump’s perceived enemies leaves the same order untouched. No lawyer gets to hold both positions for long. Pick one.
A secrecy order Trump asked for now stands between his own prosecutors and the witnesses they subpoenaed.
Where This Goes Next
First, every path in front of Judge Cannon costs somebody. Clearing the agents to testify puts a full, sworn defense of the Mar-a-Lago investigation in front of the grand jury, straight from the people who ran it, and keeping her order tight leaves the conspiracy probe at risk of losing the witnesses at the center of its own theory. Picture a referee whose ruling helped one team, and now the same ruling blocks that team’s biggest play.
Second, these agents built a public record. Most of them lost their jobs in February, and now some of them face subpoenas. Every step sits on the court docket with a date attached, and if DOJ ever charges one of them, this filing lays the groundwork for a vindictive prosecution defense.
Third, any order Cannon issues here travels up to the 11th Circuit, the same appeals court where watchdog groups already fought her Volume II rulings.
Fourth, this whole probe keeps losing altitude. The lead prosecutor is gone. Serious legal doubts hang over whether separate investigations spread across a decade even fit together into one conspiracy, and over whether Florida has jurisdiction at all, and those doubts follow every subpoena prosecutors send out of that Fort Pierce courthouse. Now a procedural knot sits in the courthouse DOJ picked.
When the government demands your silence and your testimony at the same time, the government has the problem.
Your Move
Watch Judge Cannon’s docket, because her answer will shape the next chapter of this probe. Mark October 15 on your calendar. Brennan’s grand jury date is the next pressure point.
Share this with the person in your life who still believes the rule of law runs on autopilot, and tell them these agents stood up in open court and demanded clear rules, which is exactly what the rest of us owe this country before retribution gets dressed up as justice one more time.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
On Thursday, FBI agents walked into federal court asking for clear rules, and the Justice Department and Judge Aileen Cannon’s order left them stuck in confusion, which is the last thing I will ever do to you, because Uncensored Objection gives you the facts and the law in plain English so you know exactly where you stand. Right now, before the doubt in your head talks you out of it, hit subscribe to join and support other Americans who refuse to look away, and share this post with one person who still believes the rule of law runs on autopilot.
Volume II is a government report about how public servants investigated a president’s handling of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, and the common law and First Amendment traditions of public access to government and court records presume Americans get to see that kind of record unless a specific, compelling reason says otherwise. The criminal case ended in July 2024, and the charges against Trump’s co-defendants were dropped in January 2025, so no defendant faces trial and no jury needs protection from what the report says. The special counsel regulations already let the Attorney General release a report in the public interest, and any protected discovery material or classified details can be redacted line by line instead of sealing the entire volume forever. The DOJ is doing the same thing to this report that it’s doing with the remaining Epstein files.
In my mind, Judge Cannon’s order sealing Volume II belongs in the same pile as the rest of her rulings in this case, and the law stands against it. Courts have long recognized a presumption of public access to judicial records. With no defendants left to prosecute, the only people left to protect are the American people who paid for this investigation and deserve to see what it found. The 11th Circuit reversed her once already in this saga, in 2022, after she granted Trump a special master to review the documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago. Her dismissal of the entire case rested on an Appointments Clause theory the D.C. Circuit had rejected when it upheld Robert Mueller’s appointment. When a judge keeps ruling in ways that shield the same man, you are entitled to draw a conclusion. Mine is this: Volume II stays sealed because it lays out the evidence of how Trump took classified records to Mar-a-Lago and worked to keep them from the government, and Judge Cannon has made sure you never read a word of it, at least for now.
This entire grand conspiracy investigation is a political joke. It’s not based in fact or law. It starts from a conclusion and goes shopping for a crime. The Russia investigation has been examined over and over. Robert Mueller found sweeping Russian interference in 2016. Reviews during Trump’s own first term reconfirmed the original findings. John Durham spent four years hunting for wrongdoing by the investigators, took two cases to trial, and lost both. Every prior attempt to investigate the investigators came up empty, so the Justice Department changed the question. Now the theory stitches the Russia inquiry, the Mar-a-Lago case and a decade of separate investigations into one giant plot to deprive Donald Trump of his civil rights. Look at what they call a crime. Career agents executed a search warrant signed by a federal judge. A grand jury of ordinary citizens returned the indictment. Trump’s own team certified he had returned every classified document, and the FBI later found more. Investigating a man under court supervision is how the rule of law works, and calling it a civil rights violation turns the law upside down.
Fascinating. I can't wait to see the fireworks or Cannon stumbling over her own robe.
Judge Cannon, the Supreme Court, all starring in dinner table conversations can only mean that the courts have ruled in a political manner that calls into question the legitimacy of their rulings. The laws are supposed to protect people from the disastrous rulings we are getting from the courts right now. Do the rulings set new precedent? They may be tripping over themselves, but political rulings, disregarding precedent, make everyone distrust the courts, all courts, actually.