Trump lawyers assail request for gag order
Lawyers representing former President Donald Trump against federal charges accusing him of seeking to overturn the 2020 election offered an outraged response on Monday to the government's request for a gag order, saying the attempt to “muzzle” him during his presidential campaign violated his free speech rights.
In a 25-page filing, the lawyers sought to turn the tables on the government, accusing the prosecutors in the case of using “inflammatory rhetoric” themselves in a way that “violated long-standing rules of prosecutorial ethics.”
“Following these efforts to poison President Trump's defense, the prosecution now asks the court to take the extraordinary step of stripping President Trump of his First Amendment freedoms during the most important months of his campaign against President Biden,” one of the lawyers, Gregory M. Singer, wrote. “The court should reject this transparent gamesmanship.”
The papers, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, came 10 days after prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, asked Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case, to impose a narrow gag order on Trump. The order, they said, was meant to curb Trump's “near-daily” barrage of threatening social media posts and to limit the effect his statements might have on witnesses in the case and on the potential jury pool for the trial. It is scheduled to take place in Washington starting in March.
The lawyers' attempt to fight the request has set up a showdown that will ultimately have to be resolved by Chutkan, an Obama appointee who has herself experienced the impact of Trump's menacing words.
One day after the former president wrote an online post in August saying, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU,” Chutkan received a voicemail message in her chambers from a woman who threatened to kill her. (The woman, Abigail Jo Shry, has since been arrested.)
Gag orders limiting what trial participants can say outside court are not uncommon, especially to constrain pretrial publicity in high-profile cases. But the request to gag Trump as he solidifies his position as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination has injected a current of political tension into what was already a fraught legal battle.
“Following these efforts to poison President Trump's defense, the prosecution now asks the court to take the extraordinary step of stripping President Trump of his First Amendment freedoms during the most important months of his campaign against President Biden.”
— Gregory M. Singer, lawyer