FORT PIERCE, Fla. – A federal prosecutor in the case of confidential documents of donald trump clashed with the judge on Monday as he was skeptical about questioning a request to stop the former president from making threatening comments about law enforcement officials involved in the investigation.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team is trying to establish as a condition of Trump’s release pending trial a ban on comments that could put agents participating in the case at risk. Prosecutors say these restrictions are necessary after Trump falsely claimed last month that the FBI was prepared to kill him when it searched his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents two years ago.
But prosecutor David Harbach, a member of Smith’s team, encountered immediate resistance from Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whose handling of the case has drawn intense scrutiny.
The judge questioned Harbach about how she could craft an order that would not conflict with Trump’s First Amendment rights and whether prosecutors could prove a direct link between Trump’s comments and the actions that could then follow.
“There still needs to be a correlation between the alleged dangerous comments and the risk” to public safety, she said.
At one point, while trying, despite Cannon’s frequent interruptions, to rattle off the multiple reasons he said existed for Trump’s restrictions on speech, a visibly exasperated Harbach acidly observed that “so far I have a reason.”
The comment drew a rebuke from Cannon, who said: “Mr. Harbach, I don’t appreciate your attitude.” She said if he couldn’t behave in a more professional manner, one of her colleagues could take over.
Harbach completed his arguments and later apologized to the judge, saying he did not intend to be unprofessional.
Defense attorney Todd Blanche disputed the idea that Trump’s comments posed an imminent threat to anyone in law enforcement and said prosecutors’ request would have a “deterrent” effect. Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and is expected to debate President Joe Biden on Thursday
Trump’s often incendiary rhetoric has had legal consequences in other cases. The New York judge who presided over Trump’s trial, in which he was convicted of 34 criminal charges last week, fined him a total of $10,000 for violating a gag order that prevented him from verbally attacking witnesses and jurors. A federal judge in Washington handling his election subversion case imposed a similar gag order last year, which an appeals court later upheld.
It was not immediately clear when Cannon, a Trump appointee whose the handling of the case was closely examined, can govern. 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 “blocked & loaded ready to take me out & 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.
