Judge Refuses to Gag Trump in Classified-Documents Case, Calls Out Prosecutors for Failing to Meet ‘Basic’ Requirements

The judge overseeing Trump’s classified-documents case in Florida on Tuesday rejected the prosecution’s request to gag the former president from publicly speaking about the FBI agents who raided Mar-a-Lago.

District Judge Aileen Cannon found that prosecutors failed to confer with Trump’s attorneys before filing the motion to gag Trump and did not give the defense “sufficient time” to review their filing, which was submitted late Friday of Memorial Day weekend.

“Because the filing of the Special Counsel’s motion did not adhere to these basic requirements, it is due to be denied without prejudice,” Cannon wrote in her order.

Trump’s team had asked Cannon to sanction the prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith’s office who filed the order, calling it an attempt at “unconstitutional censorship.”

“President Donald J. Trump respectfully submits this procedural opposition to the May 24, 2024 filing by the Special Counsel’s Office, which improperly asks the Court to impose an unconstitutional gag order on President Trump, as a condition of his pretrial release, based on vague and unsupported assertions about threats to law enforcement personnel whose names have been redacted from public filings and whose identities are already subject to a protective order,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.

Trump claimed last week that the authorities who stormed his property were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

In their Friday evening filing, Smith’s team claimed that Trump’s comments “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”

A document in the case stated that the FBI adhered to a standard use-of-force policy that bars the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search reasonably believes the “subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

Trump has argued that his removal of hundreds of classified documents from government safekeeping, and their storage at his Mar-a-Lago estate, were permitted under the Presidential Records Act (PRA). Special counsel Jack Smith brought 32 felony charges of unlawfully retaining national-defense intelligence against Trump.

The PRA defines presidential records as those created by the president and his staff. Smith argues that the documents mentioned in the indictment are mainly agency records, government property required by law to be archived, not Trump’s personal records. The documents were national-security reporting by congressionally created, taxpayer-funded intelligence agencies.