Prosecutors in Donald Trump’s secret documents case in Florida asked a federal judge on Friday to ban the former president from making public statements that “pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” investigating and prosecuting the case .
The request to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case, comes after the former president falsely claimed in a Truth Social post this week that the Biden administration was “AUTHORIZING THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” in her 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. The Trump campaign also claimed in a fundraising email that President Joe Biden was “locked and loaded, ready to get me out” during a search of his Mar-a-Lago property in search of classified documents.
Prosecutors from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office said in their filing that officers “acted in an appropriate and professional manner, subject to the Department of Justice’s standard use of force policy” and argued that Trump’s claims posed a threat to law enforcement officers .
“Trump’s repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widespread reports as an attempt to assassinate him, his family and Secret Service agents has compromised law enforcement officials involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and the integrity of this procedure threatened,” prosecutors wrote. . “A restriction that prohibits similar statements in the future should therefore be amended to prohibit similar communications in the future.”
In making the accusations, Trump and his campaign appeared to point to recently unsealed court records related to the 2022 search. The filings showed that the judge overseeing the case at the time questioned how the former president had not could notice that he had very sensitive documents in his bedroom.
Trump was in New Jersey when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
“As Trump well knows,” prosecutors noted in Friday’s filing, the FBI “exercised extraordinary care to execute the search warrant discreetly and without unnecessary confrontation,” scheduling the search at a time when the former president and his family would be gone.
Prosecutors said Trump’s lawyers objected to their motion, as well as its timing.
Prosecutors’ request seeks to modify Trump’s release conditions, which is different from a silence order.
When the former president was indicted, the surety made his continued release conditional on his compliance with certain conditions.
In filing the request, prosecutors are asking that Trump face higher stakes if he makes statements that the court says endanger law enforcement.
Lawyers for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday evening, but a campaign spokesperson said in an email that “Crooked Joe Biden and his Hacks and Thugs are obsessed with trying to deprive President Trump and all American voters of their First Amendment rights.” deprive. .”
“Repeated attempts to silence President Trump during the presidential campaign are blatant attempts to interfere in the election,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung wrote. “They are the last-ditch efforts of desperate Democratic Radicals waging a losing campaign for a failed president.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday rejected Trump’s claim about the authorized use of deadly force during the search, calling the allegation “false” and “extremely dangerous” during a news conference.
In a rare statement days earlier, after Trump’s initial claims, the FBI also said it had “followed standard protocol in this search, as we do for all search warrants” and that no additional steps had been ordered for Mar-a-Lago .
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges that he intentionally withheld national defense information related to classified documents discovered at his Florida estate after he left office and that he directed a Mar-a-Lago employee remove the security video from the property. The trial has been postponed indefinitely.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
