Donald Trump’s lawyers reacted on Friday to the special counsel Jack Smith in the case of classified documents, opposing your order to bar the former president from making any statements that prosecutors say put authorities involved in the investigation at risk.
In a 20-page brief, defense attorneys argued that Smith “seeks to restrict President Trump’s campaign speech” ahead of the first debate with President Joe Biden later this month.
Smith’s team asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in May to modify Trump’s release conditions in the case, citing Trump’s false claims about FBI agents being prepared to kill him during the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. Prosecutors said such statements “endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”
Trump’s lawyers argued that Smith’s request should be denied based on “the ambiguities, the lack of application criteria and the resulting chilling effect.” They also called it “a brazen effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech.”
The defense said that “not a single FBI agent who participated in the operation has made a statement, or even an argument, alleging that President Trump’s remarks put them at risk.”
The FBI said the authorization for use of deadly force that Trump appeared to be referring to in his earlier comments was boilerplate language intended to limit the use of force.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the classified documents case. The trial was postponed indefinitely.
Cannon has scheduled a hearing for June 24 on the gag order request. There is no set timeline for when she might decide on the competing records.
Trump’s lawyers on Friday made many of the same arguments they used in fighting gag orders for criminal cases in New York and Washington, D.C., including a focus on First Amendment protections, which they saw as ambiguous language in gag orders. silence proposed by prosecutors and a lack of evidence of real threats arising from Trump’s statements.
The archiving comes in the same week as Trump’s lawyers asked a New York court to end the gag order imposed against the former president during the silent trial, where Trump was later found guilty of 34 criminal charges.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
