A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily rejected a request from prosecutors to bar former President Donald J. Trump from making statements that could endanger law enforcement officials working on the case in which he is accused after he leaves office illegally storing confidential documents.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s decision was made solely on the procedural grounds that special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors had failed to properly inform Mr. Trump’s lawyers before making their request. It left open the possibility that prosecutors could try again to limit Mr. Trump’s comments about the agents if they follow procedural rules.
As part of her ruling, Judge Cannon also temporarily denied an attempt by Mr. Trump’s legal team to push back against the government. Mr. Trump’s lawyers had filed a countermotion seeking to strike the prosecution’s motion from the record and impose sanctions on Mr. Smith and his deputies for failing to follow due process.
Although Judge Cannon’s ruling chided Mr. Smith for disregarding “professional courtesy” by failing to properly follow the process for informing defense attorneys of his request, it left untouched the underlying issues of the whirlwind. These remain largely where they were when the argument between the defense and prosecution began on Friday evening.
Then, at the start of the holiday weekend, Mr. Smith’s prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to take a dramatic new step in the case: changing the conditions of Mr. Trump’s release to prevent him from making public statements that are threatening or otherwise harm the FBI agents working on the classified documents case.
The request came after Mr. Trump made baseless claims on social media and fundraising appeals that the office authorized agents to kill him during their August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
Prosecutors alleged to Judge Cannon that the former president’s comments — including one in which he falsely claimed that agents were “locked and loaded, ready to get me out” — amounted to a “grossly misleading” misinterpretation of an FBI operational plan for the search represented.
Mr. Smith’s request was the first time prosecutors had requested anything resembling a gag order in the secret documents case. Trump faces a gag order in two of his other criminal cases: a federal case in Washington in which he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and his trial in Manhattan over the cover-up of a hush money payment made to a porn actress the night before the 2016 election.
On Monday evening, two days after prosecutors turned to Judge Cannon with their limited request to silence Mr. Trump, his lawyers responded with a motion of their own, demanding that Mr. Smith and his team be held in contempt.
In the motion, Mr. Trump’s lawyers called Mr. Smith’s request “an extraordinary, unprecedented and unconstitutional censorship request” that “unjustly targets President Trump’s campaign speech while he is the front-runner for the presidency.”
They also noted that prosecutors moved forward with filing the motion at 8 p.m. Friday, rejecting their appeal to wait until the end of the holiday weekend to discuss it.
As she has done several times before, Judge Cannon used her order on Tuesday to criticize Mr. Smith, finding that his “pro forma transmission” to Mr. Trump’s lawyers “completely lacked substance and professional courtesy.”
“It should be self-evident that meaningful conferment is not a perfunctory exercise,” Judge Cannon wrote, adding that this is particularly true when the issue at hand — curbing the speech of a former president running for office again — is raised “It was the first time in these proceedings.”
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2024-05-28 17:50:36
www.nytimes.com
