Federal prosecutors on Friday night asked the judge over former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to bar any comments that could endanger law enforcement involved in the trial.
Prosecutors said Trump recently made “highly misleading” claims about an FBI search two years ago of his private club and residence, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. The request came just days after the former president falsely suggested the FBI had the authority to shoot Trump when agents stormed into Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and found more than 100 classified documents while executing a court-approved search warrant.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump falsely claimed that President Biden had “authorized the FBI to use lethal force” during the search.
Trump’s post was a response to the FBI’s operational plan for the Mar-a-Lago search, which was made public on Tuesday as part of a lawsuit filed by Trump’s legal team. The plan included boilerplate language authorizing the use of lethal force as part of the search, but prosecutors argued that Trump had distorted it.
“As President Trump is well aware, the FBI took extraordinary care to execute the search warrants in a unobtrusive and without unnecessary confrontation,” prosecutors wrote in the motion filed with Judge Eileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the case.
“They scheduled the search of Mar-a-Lago for a time when Mr. Trump and his family would not be there,” the prosecutors added. “They developed plans to coordinate with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Secret Service agents, and Mar-a-Lago staff before and during the execution of the warrant, and they also developed contingency plans for who to contact if Mr. Trump arrived on site, which never materialized.”
The request to Judge Cannon marked the first time prosecutors in the case have sought to limit Trump’s public comments.
Prosecutors did not seek to impose a gag order on Trump, but instead asked Judge Cannon to revise the conditions of his release to bar him from making any public comments that “pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agencies participating in the investigation.”
