Lawyers for former President Donald Trump on Monday evening pushed back against special prosecutor Jack Smith’s request Friday that a federal judge in Florida change Trump’s release conditions in the investigation Trump’s handling of classified documents.
Federal prosecutors have asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the documents case, to modify the condition of Trump’s release to bar him from making public statements that “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement officers ” who participate in the persecution.
“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 said. Cannon, whom Trump nominated to the bench.
“A restriction that prohibits future similar speech does not restrict legitimate speech,” they said.
The special counsel’s request to Cannon followed a false claim by Trump last week that FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate by August 2022, they were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked and loaded, ready to take me out and endanger my family.”
Trump referred to a disclosure in a court document that during that search, the FBI followed a standard use of force policy that prohibits the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search reasonably believes that the “subject of the search’ such force constitutes an imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or to any other person.”
The policy is routine and intended to limit the use of force during searches. Prosecutors noted that the search was deliberately conducted while Trump and his family were away and was coordinated with the Secret Service. No violence was used.
Prosecutors from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team argued in a lawsuit late Friday that Trump’s statements falsely suggesting that federal agents were “complicit in a plot to assassinate him” would expose law enforcement officers “to the risk of threats, violence and intimidation’. Some of them are expected to be called as witnesses at Trump’s trial.
But Trump’s lawyers on Monday called Smith’s request “extraordinary, unprecedented and unconstitutional censorship,” saying in their filing:[t]The motion wrongly focuses on President Trump’s campaign speech, while he is the leading candidate for president.”
They argue that Smith is going beyond any previous requests made by any other prosecutor in the cases against the former president because the prosecutor’s motion ties Trump’s freedom to his campaign speech.
The former president also argues that prosecutors violated local rules by not properly “consulting” with them before filing the motion. Trump’s lawyers said Smith’s team filed the motion late Friday on a holiday closing arguments this week in the separate New York “hush money” criminal case against Trump, failed to provide a reasonable transfer period, which they say is required by local rules in the Southern District of Florida. Trump’s lawyers provided email correspondence between the parties as evidence as of Friday evening.
Trump also asked Cannon to impose sanctions on the Justice Department’s legal team for allegedly violating local rules.
Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week called Trump’s claim “extremely dangerous.” Garland noted that the document Trump was referring to is a standard policy limiting the use of force, which was even used in the consensual search of President Joe Biden’s home as part of an investigation into the Democrat’s handling of classified documents.
Trump faces dozens of crimes accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, that he took with him after leaving the White House in 2021, and then obstructing the FBI’s efforts to get them back. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
It is one of four criminal cases facing Trump as he tries to win back the White House, but beyond the ongoing hush-money prosecution in New YorkIt is not clear that any of the other three will stand trial before the election.
—Robert Legare contributed reporting.
