The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida denied prosecutors’ request to bar the former president from making public statements that could endanger law enforcement agents participating in the prosecution, reports the Associated Press. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon said Tuesday that prosecutors didn’t give defense lawyers adequate time to discuss the request before it was filed Friday evening. She denied the request without prejudice, so prosecutors could file it again. Trump’s lawyers on Monday assailed a request by prosecutors to limit what he could say about a new flare-up in the case accusing him of illegally retaining classified documents after leaving office. The lawyers pushed back hard against the request by Special Counsel Jack Smith to revise Trump’s conditions of release by forbidding him to make any public comments that might endanger agents working on the prosecution, reports the New York Times.
Smith’s team requested what amounted to a limited gag order on Trump, prompted by what it called “grossly misleading” social media posts the former president made last week falsely claiming that the FBI had been authorized to kill him when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club and residence, in August 2022. The former president’s statements were based on an order for the search that contained boilerplate language spelling out that the use of deadly force could be used only in case of emergency, a standard provision applied to all FBI searches. In their motion to Cannon., Trump’s lawyers said Smith’s request was “an extraordinary, unprecedented and unconstitutional censorship application” that “unjustly targets President Trump’s campaign speech while he is the leading candidate for the presidency.” Trump’s attorneys said Smith’s request should be stricken from the docket and that he and his prosecutors should face contempt sanctions for filing it in the first place. The lawyers accused prosecutors of springing the request on them over a holiday weekend and claimed that Smith was “pursuing media coverage rather than justice.”