US District Judge Aileen Cannon has denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request to restrict Donald Trump’s public statements in the ongoing classified documents case against the former president. The prosecutors had sought to bar Trump from making public statements that could endanger law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution.
In her order, Judge Cannon ruled that the prosecution’s motion had procedural shortcomings and that they failed to properly confer with Trump’s defense team before filing the motion, as required by local court rules. She characterized the special counsel’s actions as “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy” and emphasized that “meaningful conferral is not a perfunctory exercise.”
Judge Cannon also set specific requirements for future motions in the case, mandating that they “shall not be filed absent meaningful, timely, and professional conferral.” She laid out guidelines for certificates of the conference, which must appear in a separate section at the end of the motion, specify the exact timing, method, and substance of the conferral, and include, if requested by opposing counsel, up to 200 words verbatim from the opposing side on the subject of conferral. Failure to comply with these requirements might result in sanctions, she warned.
This decision follows closely on the heels of Judge Cannon’s earlier ruling to indefinitely postpone the classified documents criminal trial, pushing the trial date back by at least two months. She cited the need for a thorough consideration of various pre-trial motions and CIPA issues.
The denied motion from prosecutors came shortly after Trump claimed that FBI agents were “authorized to shoot” him during the August 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago residence. The special counsel argued that Trump’s comments mischaracterized standard FBI practices and posed a “significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger” to law enforcement officers involved in the case.
Trump’s attorneys called the motion an “extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application,” claiming it targeted the former president’s campaign speech while he was a leading candidate for the presidency. They criticized the prosecutors, dubbing them “self-appointed Thought Police,” for “seeking to condition President Trump’s liberty on his compliance” with their views.
Judge Cannon denied the motion “without prejudice,” leaving room for prosecutors to refile the request in the future. She also declined Trump’s motion to strike and for sanctions against the special counsel’s team.
This latest development is part of a broader pattern of legal challenges Trump has faced. In a separate case regarding falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments, a New York appeals court upheld a gag order against him. Additionally, in the election interference case, a federal judge imposed a partial gag order in October 2023 due to social media posts that prosecutors claimed intimidated them and attacked witnesses.
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