NY.- Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump counterattacked aggressively – and sometimes deceptively – against an attempt to stop his public attacks on FBI agents working on his classified documents case in Florida.
In a 20-page court filing, lawyers attacked prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office for trying to limit Mr. Trump’s comments about the FBI on the eve of two major political events: the first presidential debate , scheduled for June 27, and the Republican National Convention, which will begin on July 15.
“The motion is a naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of imprisonment, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the scandalous nature of this investigation and prosecution,” the lawyers wrote. .
The dispute began last month when Smith’s team asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the case, to review Trump’s release conditions to prohibit him from making any public comments that could endanger the officers involved in the attack. process.
The petition came days after Mr. Trump made a series of blatantly false statements, claiming that the FBI had been prepared to shoot him when agents executed a search warrant in August 2022 at Mar-a-Lago, his club. private and residence in Florida. In that search, agents discovered more than 100 classified documents. Mr. Trump is now accused of illegally withholding classified information and obstructing the government’s attempts to recover it.
The distortions arose from a gross mischaracterization by the former president of a recently unsealed warrant for the Mar-a-Lago search that included boilerplate language intended to limit the use of deadly force when officers execute warrants.
The order, like hundreds of others issued by the FBI, instructed agents to use deadly force only in cases of extreme danger. But Mr. Trump and some of his allies turned those limitations around, suggesting that agents had been given the green light to kill him when they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
In their Friday night filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers softened his falsehoods, saying that he had simply “criticized” the Mar-a-Lago registry “in a way that someone in the government disagreed with and he did not like it”.
The lawyers also baselessly tried to connect prosecutors’ attempt to seek accountability for Mr. Trump’s false statements with an entirely separate conflict in the case: an allegation they made this week that the FBI failed to properly preserve evidence contained in the 45 boxes of documents that agents seized during the search of Mar-a-Lago.
Despite the heated language of the filing, Mr. Smith and his aides may have an uphill climb persuading Judge Cannon to prevent Mr. Trump from further attacking the FBI by putting freedom on the line.
Although prosecutors have been successful in imposing gag orders on Trump in other cases, this is their first attempt to prevent him from speaking at the documents trial. And as his lawyers noted, prosecutors could not point to a single example of an agent working on the documents case who faced threats because of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods.
“President Trump and the defense are equally oblivious to any hostility, harassment, or risk of harm directed at any officer involved in this case based on President Trump’s statements,” the attorneys told Judge Cannon.
Still, Mr. Trump’s attacks on the FBI have had real-world consequences in the past.
After Trump denounced the Mar-a-Lago search as a personal attack on him in 2022, a gunman attempted to shoot his way into an FBI office near Cincinnati.
The man, Ricky W. Shiffer, said at the time that “patriots” should head to Florida to defend Mr. Trump and kill FBI agents. Mr. Shiffer 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 Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, on charges related to a weapons purchase.
Hours after the guilty verdict was returned, the man, whom authorities identified as Timothy Muller, called the officer on his cell phone and told him in a voicemail that he had not gone far enough in prosecuting the man. Mr. Biden. The man promised to “hunt” the agent and kill him and his family.
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