Federal prosecutors on Special Counsel Jack Smith's team have asked the judge overseeing the classified documents case against Donald Trump for a gag order barring the former president from making public statements that "pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents," RadarOnline.com has learned.
The request comes after Trump claimed this week that the FBI agents who raided his Mar-a-Lago home while he and his family were out of the state in August 2022 were "locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger" and "authorized to shoot me" — claims that Attorney General Merrick Garland has categorized as "false" and "extremely dangerous."
During the search, agents followed a standard use-of-force policy that prohibits the use of deadly force unless someone "poses imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person."
"Those statements create a grossly misleading impression about the intentions and conduct of federal law enforcement agents — falsely suggesting that they were complicit in a plot to assassinate him — and expose those agents, some of whom will be witnesses at trial, to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment," prosecutors stated in court papers filed on Friday, per the Associated Press.
"Trump's repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widely distributed messages as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceeding."
Prosecutors added that Trump's recent comments "invite the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective" and argued that "a restriction prohibiting future similar statements does not restrict legitimate speech."
Defense lawyers objected to the motion.Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesman, responded by claiming that President Joe Biden's "Hacks and thugs are obsessed with trying to deprive President Trump and all American voters of their First Amendment rights. Repeated attempts to silence President Trump during the presidential campaign are blatant attempts to interfere in the election."
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Trump faces dozens of criminal charges accusing him of mishandling classified documents and obstruction of justice. He allegedly hoarded boxes of classified documents that he took with him when he left the White House in 2021 and obstructed federal agents' efforts to retrieve them. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
The embattled ex-president also faces several other ongoing criminal cases. He has been fined and threatened with jail time for repeatedly violating a gag order barring him from making public statements about witnesses and jurors in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial, and he was also slapped with a gag order in his federal criminal election interference case in Washington.