Prosecutors in classified files case ask judge to bar Trump from inflammatory comments about FBI

FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — The federal judge presiding over the confidential documents indictment of Donald Trump is hearing arguments on Monday about whether to bar former president from public comments which prosecutors say could put the lives of FBI agents working on the case at risk.

Special Council Jack SmithThe team says the restrictions are necessary in light of Trump’s false comments that FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022 because confidential documents were intended to kill him and his family. Trump’s lawyers say any gag order would unduly silence Trump in the heat of a presidential campaign in which he is the presumptive Republican nominee.

It was not immediately clear when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee whose the handling of the case was closely examined, can govern. Before turning her attention to the limited gag order requested by prosecutors, she should listen additional arguments Monday morning related to the Justice Department’s appointment and funding of Smithwhose team brought the charges.

The arguments are part of a three-day hearing that began Friday to deal with many of the many unresolved legal issues that have piled up in a case that was set for trial last month but has been marred by delays and a slow pace. Cannon indefinitely postponed the trialand it is virtually guaranteed that it will not occur before the November presidential elections.

Trump faces dozens of criminal charges accusing him of illegally amassing top-secret records at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the FBI’s efforts to recover them. Given the breadth of evidence presented by prosecutors, many legal experts considered the case to be the simplest of the four cases against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty. But Cannon has been slow to rule on numerous motions and has shown a willingness to grant defense requests that prosecutors consider unfounded.

Smith’s team objected last month after Trump claimed the FBI was prepared to kill him while executing a court-authorized search warrant in Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022. He was referring to the standard language of FBI policy prohibiting the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search has a reasonable belief that “the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person”.

Trump falsely claimed in a fundraising email that the FBI was “locked and loaded, ready to take me out and put my family in danger.”

Prosecutors say such comments pose a significant foreseeable risk to law enforcement, citing as examples a attempted attack on an FBI office in Ohio three days after the Mar-a-Lago search and the most recent arrest of a Trump supporter accused of threatening an FBI agent who investigated President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

“The use of such deliberately false and inflammatory language in the combustible atmosphere that Trump has created represents an imminent danger to law enforcement that must be addressed before further violence occurs,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing Friday.

Trump’s lawyers say they have failed to demonstrate that his comments directly endangered any FBI employee who participated in the Mar-a-Lago search.

“Fundamentally, the motion is based on the fact that President Trump criticized the Mar-a-Lago attack based on publicly presented motion evidence in this case, as part of his constitutionally protected campaign speech, in a way that someone in government disagreed. with and don’t like,” they said.