Relations between Donald Trump’s legal defense team and the special counsel Jac Smith‘s office was already tense, as a New York Times report explained last night, there’s a new flashpoint in the former president’s case involving classified documents.
To recap, it was last week when the suspected criminal, referring to the newly released court records, claimed via his social media platform that the Justice Department “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADAL (DEADAL) FORCE” while carrying out a court-approved procedure. search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Trump made a bizarre fundraising appeal soon after, falsely claiming that President Joe Biden was “locked and loaded” and “ready to get me out” during the FBI’s search for his glorified country club.
After the claims had been thoroughly and completely discredited and the FBI itself took the unusual step of issuing a public statement leaving no doubt that the former president and his allies simply had no idea what they were talking about had, Trump repeated the claim anyway.
The truth was completely mundane: The FBI’s relevant paperwork contained boilerplate language, used every time the bureau executed a court-approved search warrant. When the FBI searched Biden’s Delaware home as part of a separate search for classified documents, the paperwork contained the same wording. Of course, this doesn’t mean the Biden administration was “ready to take out the Democratic incumbent president itself.”
But to prosecutors, this was more than just a lie: It was a lie that endangered the lives of law enforcement officers. With this in mind, Smith’s office wants U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to limit what the Republican can say in the case, which could put law enforcement officials in danger for no reason.
This would obviously be separate from the silence order in the Trump hush money case and the unrelated silence order in the election interference case.
The presumptive Republican nominee’s lawyers have pushed back against this latest effort, calling it “an extraordinary, unprecedented and unconstitutional censorship application” that “improperly targets President Trump’s campaign speech while he is the leading candidate for president.”
The Times report added: “Mr. Trump’s legal team said Mr. Smith’s request should be struck from the docket and that he and his accusers would face contempt sanctions if they filed it in the first place.”
At no point in the filing, however, did the lawyers make any effort to defend Trump’s lie or suggest the lie had merit. On the contrary, Team Trump seems to believe that the former president should continue spreading the lie without regard to the consequences.
As for the idea that Smith is seeking “an extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional application of censorship,” let’s not forget that (a) there is nothing “extraordinary” about gag orders, as Trump and his lawyers should really know; (b) there is nothing “unprecedented” about this, especially given that the suspect has already been served with other silence orders; and (c) silence orders are not inherently “unconstitutional.”
I’m reminded again of something that U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan recently explained to one of Trump’s lawyers: “Mr. Trump is a criminal suspect. He faces four felony charges. He is under the supervision of the criminal justice system and must comply with conditions of release. He has no right to say and do exactly what he wants.”
Nevertheless, the matter will be in Cannon’s hands. If she sides with the defendant – that is, if she sides with Trump again — the special counsel’s office will almost certainly take the case to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has already signaled its willingness to overturn Cannon. Watch this space.
This message updates our related previous reporting.
UPDATE (May 28, 2024, 11:34 AM ET): Shortly after I published this, Cannon sided with Trump, concluding that Smith did not “meaningfully” consult with the defense before filing the motion. Nothing has yet been announced about a possible appeal.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
