The judge handling Donald Trump’s classified documents case has rejected a request by prosecutors to impose a gag order on the former president over his false claims that FBI officers were prepared to shoot him when they raided his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The ruling, by Aileen Cannon, Florida federal district judge, is the latest in a series of setbacks for Jack Smith, the special counsel who has spearheaded the prosecution into Trump’s alleged mishandling of documents from his time in the White House.
Cannon said she was denying the ruling because prosecutors had failed to engage in “meaningful conferral” with Trump’s defense team.
“The court finds the special counsel’s pro forma ‘conferral’ to be wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy,” she wrote. “It should go without saying that meaningful conferral is not a perfunctory exercise.”
She said Smith’s motion was being denied “without prejudice”, allowing him to file it again.
Smith submitted a request to Cannon last Friday to bar Trump from statements that “pose a significant risk to law enforcement officers involved in the prosecution”.
The move followed a false claim by Trump, initially in a fundraising email and then amplified on his Truth Social site, that the Department of Justice had authorised the FBI to use lethal force against him when they raided his home in Palm Beach, Florida, to retrieve the documents in August 2022.
“Crooked Joe Biden’s DoJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE,” he wrote on Truth Social. He had earlier said in an email that FBI officers had arrived at Mar-e-Lago “locked and loaded”, putting him and his family at risk.
In fact, the raid had been deliberately timed to ensure Trump was not present, while the justice department policy his accusations were apparently based on permits deadly force “only when necessary, that is, 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”.
Trump’s comments were criticised as “false” and “extremely dangerous” by Merrick Garland, the attorney general, who said the former president had been mischaracterising a “standard operations plan” intended to limit the use of lethal force.
Addressing Cannon, Smith’s prosecution team had said: “Trump’s repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widely distributed messages as an attempt to kill him, his family and secret service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings.”
Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, has repeatedly issued rulings that have reduced the chance of the case coming to trial before November’s presidential election, in which he is the Republicans’ presumptive nominee.
Last week, Ty Cobb, Trump’s former White House counsel, criticised Cannon’s handling of the case, saying her “incompetence” and “perceived bias” had led to extensive delays on questions other judges would have dealt with quickly.
Democrats have complained that her decisions have played into Trump’s legal strategy of delaying the case until after November’s poll, following which he would be able to have it annulled.
