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Former President Donald Trump held a rally on May 23, 2024, in New York City’s historically Democratic South Bronx neighborhood.
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked a federal court to deny Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for a gag order in the classified documents case and to hold the federal prosecutors who drafted the request in contempt.
Smith’s office has asked Florida Judge Eileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents case, to issue a gag order restricting Smith from speaking publicly about law enforcement’s 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly and misleadingly criticized the FBI’s policy on using lethal force during investigations, saying it is what the bureau does when executing any warrant.
In scathing court papers filed late on Memorial Day, Trump’s lawyers said the request for a gag order was an “extraordinary, unprecedented and unconstitutional application for censorship” targeting speech by Trump as he runs for president.
“The special counsel is improperly asking the Court to impose an unconstitutional gag order on President Trump based on vague and unsupported assertions of threats to law enforcement officials whose names have been redacted from public documents and whose identities are already the subject of protective orders,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawyers also called the prosecutors “self-appointed thought police” and said they were “attempting to condition President Trump’s freedom on conformity with their own views.”
The gag order proposed by Trump’s lawyers was most heavily contested over Smith’s request to include it as a condition of the former president’s pretrial release, meaning a probation officer, not a judge, would decide whether Trump’s words constituted a violation. This structure “requires the probation office and the court to mediate the dispute in the context of possible incarceration for defeating Mr. Smith’s boss and the candidate he endorses,” the lawyers wrote.
Trump’s team said Cannon should not only deny the request for a gag order, but also impose sanctions on “all government attorneys who participated in the decision to file the motion.”
The former president is under gag orders in a federal election interference case in Washington, D.C., and an ongoing hush money trial in New York state court.
The special counsel said Friday that Trump’s false claims put law enforcement officials at risk, some of whom may testify in the classified documents case. Prosecutors wrote that Trump’s comments “invited intimidation and harassment similar to what occurred when other participants in the litigation against Mr. Trump were targeted by his abuse.”
Both the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland have denied claims that the operational plan for searching Mar-a-Lago was in any way unusual or that Trump’s life was at risk, as former President Trump has alleged. Garland said last week that the allegations were “false” and “extremely dangerous,” while the FBI said in a statement that “no one ordered any additional measures and nothing outside of normal conduct occurred in this case.”
Garland and the FBI also noted that a similar use of lethal force policy was included in plans ahead of a search of President Joe Biden’s Delaware home during a separate investigation into his own handling of classified documents.
