Lawyers for former President Donald Trump on Friday evening aggressively — and at times misleading — pushed back against an effort to curb his public attacks on the FBI agents working on his classified documents case in Florida.
In a 20-page court filing, the lawyers attacked prosecutors from the special counsel’s office Jac Smith for trying to limit Trump’s comments about the FBI on the eve of two back-to-back political events: the first presidential debate, scheduled for June 27, and the Republican National Convention, which was set to begin on July 15.
“The motion is a naked attempt to impose totalitarian censorship on core political speech, under threat of imprisonment, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution ,” the lawyers wrote.
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The dispute began last month when Smith’s team asked Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case, to review Trump’s release conditions to prevent him from making public comments that could endanger officers involved in the proceedings .
The request came days after Trump made a series of blatantly false statements claiming the FBI was prepared to shoot him when agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022. During that search, agents discovered more than 100 secret documents. Trump now faces charges of illegally withholding classified information and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve it.
The distortions stemmed from the former president’s gross mischaracterization of a recently released warrant for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, which included boilerplate language intended to limit the use of deadly force when officers execute arrest warrants.
The order, like hundreds of others issued by the FBI, instructed agents to use deadly force only in cases of extreme danger. But Trump and some of his allies have turned those restrictions on their head, suggesting that officers had been given the green light to kill him as they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
In their filing Friday evening, Trump’s lawyers softened his falsehoods, saying he had merely “criticized” the search for Mar-a-Lago “in a way that someone in the administration disagreed with and that someone did not like.” finds.”
The lawyers also baselessly tried to link prosecutors’ attempt to bring accountability for Trump’s false statements to an entirely separate conflict in the case: an accusation they made this week that the FBI had failed to to properly preserve the evidence in the 45 boxes of documents that officers had properly preserved. seized during the search of Mar-a-Lago.
Despite the overheated language in the filing, Smith and his deputies may face an uphill climb when it comes to convincing the judge to stop Trump from further attacking the FBI by risking freedom.
While prosecutors have succeeded in obtaining a silence order from Trump in other cases, this is their first attempt to block his speech in the documents trial. And as his lawyers noted, prosecutors failed to cite a single example of an agent working on the documents case facing threats over Trump’s falsehoods.
“President Trump and the defense are also not aware of any hostility, intimidation or risk of harm toward any officer involved in this case based on President Trump’s statements,” the attorneys told Cannon.
Still, Trump’s attacks on the FBI have had real-world consequences in the past.
After Trump labeled the 2022 search for Mar-a-Lago as a personal attack on him, a gunman in Ohio tried to shoot his way into an FBI field office near Cincinnati.
The man, Ricky W. Shiffer, said at the time that “patriots” should go to Florida to defend Trump and kill FBI agents. Shiffer was eventually killed during a shootout with local police.
In a separate incident, a Texas man was arrested Thursday and charged with threatening to “slaughter” one of the FBI agents who worked on the case that resulted in the conviction of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, on accusation of purchasing weapons. .
Hours after the guilty verdict was handed down, the man, identified by authorities as Timothy Muller, called the officer on his cell phone and told him in a voicemail message that he had not gone far enough in prosecuting Biden. The man promised to “hunt” the officer and kill him and his family.
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