Former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team on Friday night delivered an aggressive, and at times misleading, rebuttal to efforts to curb Mr. Trump’s public attacks on the FBI agents working on his classified documents case in Florida.
In 20 pages of court documents, the lawyers blasted prosecutors from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office for trying to limit Trump’s comments about the FBI on the eve of two key political events: the first presidential debate scheduled for June 27 and the Republican National Convention, which begins on July 15.
“This motion is a blatant attempt to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of imprisonment, and a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s appeal to the American people about the outrageousness of this investigation and prosecution,” the lawyers wrote.
The fight began last month when Mr. Smith’s team asked Judge Eileen M. Cannon, who is presiding over the case, to revise the terms of Mr. Trump’s release to bar him from making any public statements that could endanger investigators involved in the process.
The request came days after Trump made a series of blatantly false statements alleging that the FBI was preparing to shoot him when they executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022. Agents found more than 100 classified documents in that search, and Trump now stands charged with unlawfully retaining classified information and obstructing the government’s efforts to recover it.
The distortion arose from the former president’s gross misrepresentation of the recently disclosed Mar-a-Lago search orders, which contained boilerplate language intended to limit agents’ use of lethal force in executing the warrant.
The order, like hundreds of others issued by the FBI, instructed agents to use lethal force only in extreme cases, but Trump and some of his allies have subverted those restrictions, suggesting agents had been given permission to kill Trump when they stormed Mar-a-Lago.
In a filing Friday night, Trump’s lawyers downplayed his falsehoods, saying he was simply “criticizing” the Mar-a-Lago search “in a way that someone in the administration did not agree with and did not like.”
The defense also baselessly tried to link the prosecutors’ attempt to hold Trump accountable for his false statements to an entirely separate conflict in the case: their accusation this week that the FBI failed to properly preserve evidence contained in 45 boxes of documents seized during the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Despite the extreme language in their filing, Smith and his cohorts may have a tough road to persuade Judge Cannon to stop Trump from further attacking the FBI at the risk of his liberty.
While prosecutors have been successful in obtaining gag orders against Trump in other cases, this is the first time they have sought to bar him from speaking in a documents trial, and, as Trump’s lawyers have pointed out, the prosecutors have been unable to cite a single instance in which investigators working on the documents case had been threatened by Trump for making false statements.
“President Trump and his defense are similarly unaware of the hostility, harassment and risk of harm directed at agents involved in this case based on President Trump’s statements,” the lawyers wrote to Judge Cannon.
Still, Trump’s attacks on the FBI have had real-world consequences in the past.
In 2022, after President Trump denounced the Mar-a-Lago raid as a personal attack on him, a gunman in Ohio tried to open fire on an FBI office near Cincinnati.
The man, named Ricky W. Schiffer, said at the time that “patriots” should travel to Florida to protect Trump and kill FBI agents. Schiffer was eventually killed in a shootout with local police.
In a separate incident, a Texas man was arrested Thursday and accused of threatening to “massacre” one of the FBI agents who worked on the case that led to the conviction of President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, on charges related to his gun purchase.
Hours after the guilty verdict, a man whom authorities identified as Timothy Mueller called the agent’s cellphone and left a voicemail saying the agent wasn’t doing enough to indict Biden. The man vowed to “hunt down” the agent and kill him and his family.
