Prosecutors in Donald Trump’s classified documents case have asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to impose a gag order on the indicted former president after he falsely told his supporters that federal agents were prepared to kill him.
Special Counsel Seeks Gag Order Over Trump’s ‘Locked & Loaded’ Claim
Prosecutors urged the judge to bar Trump from making public statements that “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents.”
Trump’s false accusation—that FBI agents were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger” when they executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022—was propagated by many Republicans.
Prosecutors urged Cannon to bar Trump from making public statements that “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents.”
“The Government’s request is necessary because of several intentionally false and inflammatory statements recently made by Trump that distort the circumstances under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation planned and executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago,” they wrote.
“Those statements create a grossly misleading impression about the intentions and conduct of federal law enforcement agents—falsely suggesting that they were complicit in a plot to assassinate him—and expose those agents, some of whom will be witnesses at trial, to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment.”
- Trump is already under a gag order in his ongoing criminal trial in New York, and thus far has violated it nine times.
- Trump also violated the gag order during his civil bank fraud trial last fall.
In Florida, Trump faces 40 felony charges, including willful retention of national defense information, obstruction, and making false statements. Cannon, a Trump appointee, is widely seen as having made rulings favorable to his desire to delay trial until after the election.
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CNN's Tom Foreman fact-checks Donald Trump's lie that Biden authorized the Department of Justice to use "deadly force" when raiding Mar-a-Lago for classified documents.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith Seeks Partial Gag Order After Trump’s False Assassination Claims About FBI Search
May 25, 2024 1:27pm
Smith’s team asked Judge Aileen Cannon to “take steps immediately to halt this dangerous campaign to smear law enforcement.”
Trump has posted repeatedly on social media that the FBI was “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
His comments were based on a filing in his criminal case on charges that he withheld government-owned classified documents and obstructed efforts to retrieve them. The filing was a standard form that outlined the Justice Department’s use-of-force policy in the search. It was amplified by right-wing media, including Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, but refuted by other outlets, including Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, who reported that the standard policy also was used in the search of President Joe Biden’s home, along with other searches.
In their filing, Smith’s team wrote that “the FBI used a form that contains standard and unobjectionable language setting out the Department of Justice’s use-of-force policy, which prohibits the use of deadly force except ‘when the officer 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.’ … The inclusion of that policy is routine practice to restrict the use of force, and it is attached to countless warrants across the country. Moreover, as Trump is well aware, no force was used or threatened in executing the Mar-a-Lago search warrant: as planned, the FBI executed the search warrant in a professional and cooperative manner, at a time when Trump and his family were out of the state.”
Trump, though, has written such things that the FBI “was authorized to shoot me,” while also claiming that it was Biden who authorized the use of deadly force against him.
Smith’s team argued that “these deceptive and inflammatory claims expose the law enforcement professionals who are involved in this case to unjustified and unacceptable risks: they invite the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective. Those risks have the potential to undermine the integrity of the proceedings as well as jeopardize the safety of law enforcement.”
- Trump also is under a partial gag order in his hush money trial in New York, and in the federal January 6th case in Washington. The orders restrict him from attacking certain individuals involved in the proceedings, as well as their family members.
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