Special Counsel Jack Smith is once again attempting to silence President Trump.
Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion on Friday night seeking to modify President Trump’s release conditions in the classified documents case. The proposed modification would bar Trump from criticizing law enforcement for authorizing deadly force during the unlawful August 8, 2022, raid on his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, which was conducted to search for disputed alleged classified documents from his presidency.
Last week, Breaking Digest reported that newly unsealed documents revealed the FBI had authorization to use “deadly force” during the raid on Trump’s private property. Upon hearing this, Trump was furious and declared that agents were “locked and loaded, ready to take me out and put my family in danger.”
Now, Jack Smith is denying these claims and asking a federal judge to issue a gag order against Trump, preventing him from “falsely” suggesting that FBI agents “were complicit in a plot to assassinate” him.
The authorization of deadly force, along with contingency plans in case of a shootout at Mar-a-Lago, including having a medic on-site and a nearby trauma center on standby, was unsealed Tuesday by Judge Aileen Cannon and first reported by Julie Kelly.
Tons of new unsealed filings on classified docs case–I will try to post as much as I can (there goes the workout) but this is mind-blowing.
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 21, 2024
FBI authorized the use of deadly force at Mar-a-Lago pic.twitter.com/f0lR6UifAH
Below is a screenshot of the use of deadly force instructions.
You can read this and other unsealed documents here.
President Trump responded to Jack Smith’s attempt to obtain a second gag order against him:
Deranged Jack Smith has asked Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida for a Gag Order on me, so that I cannot talk about all of the Crimes he has committed, including the Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Unwarranted RAID of Mar-a-Lago. I guess they’re hoping they can silence me from telling the TRUTH like the Corrupt and Highly Conflicted Judge in New York City has done. Gag Orders have a very strong tendency to BACKFIRE, and if anybody should be GAGGED, it should be Deranged Jack, who was recently caught doing very bad things – and I should be able to talk about that, and everything else having to do with this Hoax – from which Crooked Joe Biden was FULLY EXONERATED!
Deadline reported:
Special Counsel Jack Smith is asking a federal judge to issue a partial gag order restricting Donald Trump from falsely claiming that FBI agents who searched his Mar-A-Lago estate in 2022 were part of a plot to assassinate him.
Smith’s team asked Judge Aileen Cannon to “take steps immediately to halt this dangerous campaign to smear law enforcement.”
Trump has posted repeatedly on social media that the FBI was “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
His comments were based on a filing in his criminal case on charges that he withheld government-owned classified documents and obstructed efforts to retrieve them. The filing was a standard form that outlined the Justice Department’s use-of-force policy in the search. It was amplified by right-wing media, including Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, but refuted by other outlets, including Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, who reported that the standard policy also was used in the search of President Joe Biden’s home, along with other searches.
In their filing, Smith’s team wrote that “the FBI used a form that contains standard and unobjectionable language setting out the Department of Justice’s use-of-force policy, which prohibits the use of deadly force except ‘when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.’ … The inclusion of that policy is routine practice to restrict the use of force, and it is attached to countless warrants across the country. Moreover, as Trump is well aware, no force was used or threatened in executing the Mar-a-Lago search warrant: as planned, the FBI executed the search warrant in a professional and cooperative manner, at a time when Trump and his family were out of the state.”
ABC News quoted Smith’s filing (excerpt):
“The Government moves to 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,” the filings from Smith said.
“The government’s request is necessary because of several intentionally false and inflammatory statements recently made by Trump that 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.”
…”Trump… has grossly distorted… standard practices by mischaracterizing them as a plan to kill him, his family, and U.S. Secret Service agents,” the filing says. “Those deceptive and inflammatory assertions irresponsibly put a target on the backs of the FBI agents involved in this case, as Trump well knows.”
…The filing says, “As Trump is well aware, the FBI took extraordinary care to execute the search warrant unobtrusively and without needless confrontation: they scheduled the search of Mar-a-Lago for a time when he and his family would be away; they planned to coordinate with Trump’s attorney, Secret Service agents, and Mar-a-Lago staff before and during the execution of the warrant; and they planned for contingencies—which, in fact, never came to pass—about with whom to communicate if Trump were to arrive on the scene.”
