By Alan Feuer
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily denied a request by prosecutors to bar former President Donald Trump from making statements that might endanger law enforcement agents working on the case in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office.
The decision by the judge, Aileen Cannon, was made solely on the procedural grounds that prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, had failed to properly inform Trump’s lawyers before making their request. It left open the possibility that the prosecution could try again to restrict Trump’s remarks about the agents if it follows the procedural rules.
As part of her decision, Cannon also temporarily denied an attempt by Trump’s legal team to push back against the government. Trump’s lawyers had filed a counter-motion seeking to have the prosecutors’ request stricken from the record and to have sanctions imposed on Smith and his deputies for failing to follow the proper procedure.
Even though Cannon’s ruling rebuked Smith for having ignored “professional courtesy” by failing to properly follow the process for informing defense lawyers of its request, it left the underlying issues in the whirlwind spat untouched. Those remain largely where they stood when the dispute between the defense and prosecution began on Friday evening.
It was then, at the start of the holiday weekend, that Smith’s prosecutors asked Cannon to undertake a dramatic new step in the case: to revise the conditions of Trump’s release to keep him from making any public statements that could threaten or otherwise harm the FBI agents working on the classified documents case.
The request came after Trump claimed in social media and fundraising appeals, without basis, that the bureau had authorized agents to kill him during their August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.
Prosecutors asserted to Cannon that the former president’s remarks — including one in which he falsely claimed that agents were “locked & loaded ready to take me out” — were a “grossly misleading” misinterpretation of an FBI operational plan for the search.
The request by Smith marked the first time that prosecutors had requested anything resembling a gag order in the classified documents case. Trump is facing gag orders in two of his other criminal proceedings: a federal case in Washington in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election and his trial in Manhattan on charges of covering up a hush money payment to a porn actress made on the eve of the 2016 election.
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