The lawyers for former President Donald Trump asked a federal judge on Monday to turn down special counsel Jack Smith’s request for a gag order in the case involving classified papers and to hold the federal prosecutors who wrote the request guilty of contempt.
Smith’s office has asked Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge in charge of the secret documents case, to issue a gag order against the former president. This would prevent him from publicly talking about the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate by police in 2022.
The likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has frequently and falsely criticized the FBI for having a policy in place about the use of deadly force during the search. This is something the FBI does with every warrant it serves.
In a harsh court statement late on Memorial Day, Trump’s lawyers said that the request for a gag order was a “extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application” meant to silence Trump’s speech while he runs for president.
Defense lawyers wrote that the special counsel “wrongly asks the Court to impose an unconstitutional gag order on President Trump… based on vague and unsupported claims about threats to law enforcement personnel whose names have been redacted from public filings and whose identities are already subject to a protective order.”
Also, the lawyers said that the prosecutors, whom they called “self-appointed Thought Police,” were “trying to condition President Trump’s liberty on his compliance” with their own ideas.
Smith’s request to add the gag order to Trump’s conditions of pre-trial release was one of the parts of the proposed gag order that Trump’s lawyers fought the hardest against. This would mean that a probation officer, not the judge, would decide if Trump’s comments were a violation. They wrote that that structure would “require the Probation Office and the Court to mediate disputes while potentially imprisoning a political opponent who is beating Smith’s boss and preferred candidate.”
Trump’s team said that in addition to turning down the request for a gag order, Cannon should punish “all government attorneys who participated in the decision to file the Motion.”
A gag order has been put on the former president in both the federal election influence case in Washington, DC, and the hush money trial that is still going on in New York state court.
On Friday, the special counsel said that Trump’s lies had put police officers in danger, and some of them could testify in the case involving the classified papers. Police said that his words “invite the kind of threats and harassment that have happened when other people involved in the legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his insults.”
People have said that the operation’s plan to search Mar-a-Lago was unique and that Trump’s life was in danger, but both the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland have denied these claims. The FBI said in a statement that “no one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.” Garland called the claim “false” and “extremely dangerous” last week.
It was also in the plans for a search of President Joe Biden’s home in Delaware before the deadly force policy was put in place. This was part of a different investigation into how he handled classified documents.
