Donald Trump addressing a crowd during a campaign rally at Smith Reynolds Airport on September 8, 2020 in Winston Salem, North Carolina. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s lawyers looked to pull the old switcheroo Monday when they requested a federal judge to reject the gag order in the classified documents case that was requested by special counsel Jack Smith’s request – and instead find the prosecution in contempt.
Smith’s office last week requested Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the classified document case in Florida, to impose a gag order on Trump, limiting his ability to publicly discuss the law enforcement search of his Mar-a-Lago resort back in 2022. That came after the former president falsely claimed that the FBI had been authorized to kill him, a claim rebutted by the bureau itself.
On Memorial Day, the preemptive GOP nominee’s attorneys claimed that the gag order request was an “extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application,” meant to target Trump’s speech during his run for president, CNN reported. Vehemently contested is the special counsel’s suggestion that the gag order be added to Trump’s conditions of pre-trial release, meaning that a probation officer, not a judge, would decide whether the former president’s comments are a violation.
Trump is currently under a gag order in New York state court for his ongoing hush money trial and in Washington, DC for his election interference case.
In Florida, Trump’s defense attorneys argued that the special counsel “improperly” requested a gag order “based on vague and unsupported assertions about threats to law enforcement personnel.” Attorneys also referred to prosecutors as “self-appointed Thought Police,” and claimed they were “seeking to condition President Trump’s liberty on his compliance.”
Trump’s legal team implored the judge to not only reject the gag order but also impose sanctions on “all government attorneys who participated in the decision to file the Motion.”
Randall Eliason, a law professor at George Washington University and former federal prosecutor, suggested the defense arguments were without merit, posting on X: “I think this is the whiniest pleading I’ve ever read.”
