Jack Smith Asks Judge to Bar Trump from Making Statements That Are a ‘Danger to Law Enforcement’
Prosecutors on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team requested that the judge in Donald Trump’s federal criminal case in Florida bar the former president from making statements that “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” involved in the case.
Trump has been charged with retaining classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Prosecutors say the former president also obstructed the government’s attempts to retrieve them. In August 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, where they found boxes of government materials. The former president has pleaded not guilty.
Trump alleged this week that the Biden administration “authorized the use of ‘deadly force'” in the raid. The accusation was seized on by several Republicans, who subsequently claimed the FBI tried to “assassinate” Trump. However, legal observers noted that the term “deadly force” regularly appears in search warrants.
“It says essentially, you can only fire your weapon, you can only use lethal force if there is imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury to somebody else,” noted CNN’s Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor.
On Friday night, Smith’s team asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to impose a gag order on Trump, ordering him not to make incendiary statements about law enforcement in the case.
“The Government’s request is necessary because of several intentionally false and inflammatory statements recently made by Trump that distort the circumstances under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation planned and executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago,” prosecutors wrote to Cannon. “Those statements create a grossly misleading impression about the intentions and conduct of federal law enforcement agents — falsely suggesting that they were complicit in a plot to assassinate him — and expose those agents, some of whom will be witnesses at trial, to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment.”
Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020, has come under fire for her handling of the case, which critics say she appears to be slow-walking to ensure that it does not begin before November’s election, when Trump is slated to face President Joe Biden in a rematch of 2020.
Smith is also prosecuting Trump in federal court in Washington, D.C. over the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. He is under a gag order in that case as well. The ex-president is also under a partial gag order in his criminal trial in Manhattan, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records.
