US District Judge Aileen Cannon 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.”
Moreover, Judge Cannon also set specific requirements in future motions in the case, mandating that they “shall not be filed absent meaningful, timely, and professional conferral.” She also 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, no more than 200 words verbatim from the opposing side on the subject of conferral. Judge Cannon warned that failure to comply with these requirements might result in sanctions.
This decision came just weeks after Judge Cannon indefinitely postponed the classified documents criminal trial, moving the trial date back at least two months. In her earlier ruling, Cannon stated:
[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture – before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming – would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations as necessary to present this case to a jury.
The denied motion, filed by prosecutors last week, came 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.
In their motion, prosecutors asserted that Trump had “distorted the standard inclusion of the policy limiting the use of deadly force by mischaracterizing it as a claim that the FBI ‘WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME,’ was ‘just itching to do the unthinkable,’ and was ‘locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.'” They argued that these “deceptive and inflammatory claims expose the law enforcement professionals who are involved in this case to unjustified and unacceptable risks.”
In response, Trump’s attorneys called it an “extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application” that targeted the former president’s campaign speech while he was a leading candidate for the presidency. They criticized that the prosecutors, whom they referred to as “self-appointed Thought Police,” were “seeking to condition President Trump’s liberty on his compliance” with their own views.
Judge Cannon denied the motion “without prejudice,” which means prosecutors could refile the request in the future. She also declined Trump’s motion to strike and for sanctions against the special counsel’s team.
This is not the first time Trump has faced gag orders in his ongoing legal battles. In the case regarding falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments, the New York appeals court upheld a gag order against him. Similarly, in Trump’s election interference case, a federal judge entered a gag order in October 2023 due to social media posts that prosecutors said intimidated prosecutors and attacked witnesses.
