Left: Donald Trump (AP Photo/Mike Stewart), File); Center: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. Senate); Right: Special counsel Jack Smith (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Special counsel Jack Smith on Friday repeated his request to the judge in charge of the Mar-a-Lago documents case to impose a gag order on former president and convicted felon Donald Trump.
In a 13-page motion of modification for conditions of release, the government again argues restrictions on the 45th president’s speech are necessary due to recent statements “that pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents.”
Notably, the prosecution’s filing is substantially similar to their May 24 filing requesting the same. In fact, most of the government’s reprise motion is verbatim taken from the earlier motion, which U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon tersely denied without prejudice on May 28.
The new filing makes some small changes to comply with a strongly-worded court order about “professional courtesy.”
In the gag order denial, Cannon accused the government of not “meaningfully” conferring with the defense before making the request — and threatened to impose sanctions if a series of new requirements on how to certify such a future conferral were not followed.
Those requirements were:
[A]ll certificates of conference going forward shall (1) appear in a separate section at the end of the motion, not embedded in editorialized footnotes; (2) specify, in objective terms, the exact timing, method, and substance of the conferral conducted; and (3) include, if requested by opposing counsel, no more than 200 words verbatim from the opposing side on the subject of conferral, again in objective terms.
The new gag order request appears to abide by those rules. While the original request did not contain a formal certificate regarding the conference between the state and the defense, the second-to-last page of Smith’s revamped request is dedicated to exactly that.
The most substantive change to the filing now reads as follows:
Government counsel have conferred in a good-faith effort to resolve the issues raised in the motion, but were unable to do so. Counsel for defendant Trump agreed that no further conferral was necessary and requested that the following statement be included here:
“President Trump opposes the motion. As an initial matter, we do not believe that the Court or the defense should have to address the significant and complex constitutional issues presented by this motion until Pretrial Services has provided its views about whether such a condition is necessary to meet the purposes of the Bail Reform Act and how such a condition would be enforced. President Trump respectfully requests that the Court direct Pretrial Services to provide that input to the parties as soon as is practicable. On the merits, President Trump’s position is that the requested modification is a blatant violation of the First Amendment rights of President Trump and the American People, which would in effect allow President Trump’s political opponent to regulate his campaign communications to voters across the country. We seek the customary two weeks to respond to the motion, and we respectfully request that the defense opposition deadline run from the time at which the parties and the Court receive the requested information from Pretrial Services.”
As Law&Crime previously reported, Cannon’s denial of the gag order also pointedly criticized the use of “editorialized footnotes,” in which the government poked fun at defense counsel for complaining about the timing of the motion because of the long, holiday weekend.
The new version of the gag order request deletes the references to defense lawyers in that footnote, instead citing a May 24 Truth Social re-post in which Trump allegedly “continued to issue false statements smearing and endangering the agents who executed the search.”
Finally, the new version also adds a footnote about attempting to get the opinion of pre-trial services officials on the gag order request.
“The Government contacted the Probation Office to ascertain its position on the relief the Government seeks,” the new filing reads. “The Probation Office advised that because Trump was released on a bond that does not have pretrial supervision as a special condition, that office is not supervising him and it would be outside the scope of the office’s authority to take a position on this motion without a request from the Court.”
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