Special Counsel Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon to bar former President Donald Trump from speaking about law enforcement after he suggested that the FBI was planning to assassinate him while searching Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
A Trump campaign email sent to supporters earlier this week claimed that FBI agents were “authorized to shoot” Trump and “itching to do the unthinkable” during the raid, while the former president also suggested in a series of Truth Social posts that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Joe Biden had authorized his assassination.
Smith, whose federal investigations of Trump resulted in two different criminal indictments last year, asked Cannon to change the “conditions of release” for the former president due to his allegations about the FBI, in a motion filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Friday.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who has been heavily criticized for a series of rulings favoring the ex-president, is overseeing the federal case regarding Trump’s post-presidency handling of classified and other sensitive government documents. Smith’s filing urged Cannon to gag Trump due to the “unacceptable risk” to law enforcement agents involved in his case.
The motion argues that “several intentionally false and inflammatory statements” recently made about the August 2022 raid by Trump “distort the circumstances under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation planned and executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.”
“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,” the motion reads.
