Trump Claims Sacred Right To Call In Troll Storms On FBI Agents
Because FIRST AMENDMENT!
Aileen Cannon
There may be no better barometer for how off the rails Judge Aileen Cannon is than the crazy shit Trump says in his filings, confident that he’ll face no blowback from the court.
Just get a load of this stuff:
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In Jack Smith’s most recent shocking display of overreach and disregard for the Constitution, the Special Counsel’s Office asks the Court to enter an unconstitutional gag order as one of the release conditions on the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election. Like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Smith seeks to restrict President Trump’s campaign speech as the first presidential debate approaches at the end of this month. Smith’s motion goes one step further in his efforts to interfere in the 2024 presidential election and assist President Biden, by seeking improper restrictions on President Trump’s core protected speech that would continue through the Republican National Convention in July, and thereafter, until this case is dismissed for one or more of the myriad reasons we have identified.
In one paragraph, his lawyers described a gag order approved by the DC Circuit “unconstitutional;” accused the prosecutors of misconduct; omitted an honorific to which the special counsel is entitled, while expropriating one to which their client is not; claimed without evidence that President Biden is controlling the Trump cases, including the New York state one, for his own political benefit; and treated the dismissal of these charges as an inevitability. And they did it with perfect confidence that they’ll receive zero pushback from the court for their egregiously inappropriate behavior.
The filing was in response to a motion by the special counsel to stop Trump painting a target on the back of the FBI agents who executed the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022, discovering dozens of classified documents Trump’s lawyer had attested were not there. The prosecutors first requested this relief on May 24 after Trump falsely claimed to have discovered a “report” that the FBI came in “locked and loaded” ready to “assassinate” him. The “report” was his own motion to suppress filed three days prior, which misquoted the boilerplate language from the FBI “Policy Statement on Use of Deadly Force” on the operations order for the warrant.
Trump and his allies spent a couple of news cycles lying about an FBI plot to murder Biden’s political opponent, including his lawyer Christina Bobb, who signed the aforementioned false attestation.
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Blanche did what he does best: He flopped to the ground in front of the ref and screamed bloody murder, howling that his client had been denied his meet-and-confer rights and demanding sanctions on the prosecution. And because that ref is Judge Cannon, she rewarded his performance by screaming at the special counsel, striking the May 24 motion, and ordering the prosecutor henceforward to print verbatim a 200 word statement from opposing counsel explaining his objection to any motion.
On May 31, the government renewed its motion, requesting that the court “modify defendant Donald J. Trump’s conditions of release, to make clear that he may not make statements that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents participating in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”
Today’s primal scream is a response to that motion. As before, it’s chock full of wild accusations, such as the claim that the motion is a “naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration,” and an attempt to silence “ideas that President Biden, Smith, or the prosecution team in this case find to be deceptive, disagreeable, or otherwise inconvenient to their election-interference narrative.”
What it’s missing is any reference to Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, the Supreme Court case which empowers judges to curtail extrajudicial statements which pose a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” an ongoing proceeding.
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Instead Blanche repeats the same First Amendment analysis which was already rejected by the DC Circuit when it approved the gag order in Trump’s election interference case. He even trots out the blatantly stupid lie about the heckler’s veto! He does, however, make a token effort to distinguish this case from the DC one by noting that special counsel is moving here to modify conditions of release, rather than to restrict extrajudicial statements. But even the he adds a gratuitous swipe at “the D.C. Circuit’s flawed reasoning.”
Perhaps most insidiously, Trump insists that there’s no evidence that the FBI agents have been harmed by his lies about them coming to kill him. In fact, two years ago someone gave an unredacted copy of the warrant showing two signatures of the FBI agents who signed it to Breitbart, after which they were immediately doxxed and threatened. (We’re not going to link to the article, which only compounds the problem.)
Given Judge Cannon’s penchant for putting witness and grand jury information on the public docket, it’s hardly surprising that the government isn’t racing to file an affidavit from an agent attesting to the harassment he faced as a result of the former president’s online bullying.
The government’s reply is due Friday. And considering the alacrity with which Judge Cannon has handled motions thus far, we can expect the judge to address this purported danger to federal agents by 2025 … probably.
US v. Trump [SDFL Docket via Court Listener]
