Prosecutors seeking gag order on Trump in election case

Prosecutors have asked the judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election to impose “a narrowly tailored” gag order on him, citing his “near-daily” social media attacks on people involved in the case, according to court papers released Friday.

The request to Judge Tanya Chutkan of U.S. District Court in Washington, who has been the subject of some of Trump’s verbal assaults, brought to a head the simmering issue of the former president’s online statements.

In a 19-page motion, prosecutors said some of the people Trump has gone after on social media – including the special counsel, Jack Smith, who has filed two indictments against him – have experienced subsequent threats from others. Trump’s statements, they said, could also affect witnesses and the potential jury pool for the trial, which is scheduled to take place in Washington starting in March.

“Since the indictment in this case, the defendant has spread disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the court, prosecutors and prospective witnesses,” federal prosecutors wrote.

“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election,” they wrote, “the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution – the judicial system – and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals – the court, the jury pool, witnesses and prosecutors.”

The gag order sought by the government would prevent Trump from making any statements about the identity or testimony of witnesses in the case or any remarks about anyone involved in the proceeding that could be considered “disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.”

“The government seeks a narrow, well-defined restriction that is targeted at extrajudicial statements that present a serious and substantial danger of materially prejudicing this case,” prosecutors wrote.

Regardless of the outcome of the request, the legal battle over a gag order on the famously outspoken Trump will no doubt lead to scorched-earth arguments about his First Amendments rights – a defense his lawyers have already sought to raise.

The fight will be all the more intense given Trump’s status as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his intention to make the prosecutions a central issue in his campaign.

John Lauro, a lawyer representing Trump in the election interference case, declined to comment on the government’s request. A spokesperson for Trump said that the Justice Department was “corruptly and cynically continuing to attempt to deprive President Trump of his First Amendment rights.”

Almost from the moment he entered public life, Trump has reflexively attacked his enemies in vivid and often vicious fashion, making use of social media in particular. But now that he is a defendant, facing four indictments in four different cities, his habit of threatening and bullying those in his way has bumped up against the traditional strictures of the criminal justice system.

The request by prosecutors for a gag order was initially made in a sealed filing to protect the identities of the people who had been threatened. Smith’s team filed a public version of their request Friday with limited redactions.

The issue of Trump’s threatening statements began almost immediately after he was indicted last month on three overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, to disrupt the certification of his loss to Joe Biden and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.

The day after he was arraigned, Trump posted a message on his social media platform, Truth Social, saying, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you.” Trump’s campaign quickly said the statement referred to the former president’s political adversaries.

Still, the government complained about the post, and one week later, at a hearing in Washington, Chutkan sent a shot across Trump’s bow, telling his lawyers that she would not tolerate any remarks from the former president that might “intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors.”

“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case,” Chutkan said. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.”

But within days, Trump tested that warning by posting a string of messages on Truth Social that largely amplified others criticizing Chutkan.

In their filing Friday, prosecutors went through a long litany of Trump’s social media attacks, noting how he has referred to Smith several times as “deranged” and to the prosecutors working under him as a “team of thugs.” They pointed out that Trump has called Chutkan “a radical Obama hack” and a “biased, Trump-hating judge.”

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Prosecutors also said Trump has attacked the residents of Washington who one day will be called upon to serve as the jury pool for his trial. In one post, Trump said he would never get a fair hearing from those who lived in the “filthy and crime ridden” district, which he said “is over 95% anti-Trump.”

The filing described how Trump had attacked a prosecutor in the other case that Smith is handling – one in which the former president stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after leaving office and then conspiring with two of his aides to obstruct the government’s attempts to get them back.

In late August, Trump, apparently referring to an article in the New York Post, attacked the prosecutor in the documents case, Jay Bratt, for having met at the White House with officials of the Biden administration. But prosecutors said that, as Trump knew from the discovery evidence he had received in the case, Bratt went to the White House as part of the investigation of the classified documents case to interview a “career military official” who worked there.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Seeking to connect Trump’s out-of-court statements directly to the charges they have brought, prosecutors cited several social media attacks that reached back to the chaotic postelection period when Trump was spreading lies that widespread fraud had marred the vote count. The prosecutors accused Trump of knowing that his menacing remarks at that time often inspired “others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets.”

As an example, they cited Chris Krebs, the former head of the government’s cybersecurity agency, whom Trump had fired and then attacked on Twitter after Krebs vouched for the integrity of the 2020 election.

Not long after those attacks, prosecutors noted, one of Trump’s lawyers went on conservative TV outlet Newsmax and declared that Krebs “should be drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

The government’s filing also mentioned Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers, whom Trump and his allies falsely accused of having mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.

After Trump “spread false accusations” against Freeman and Moss – who are mother and daughter – they were “inundated” by “pernicious threats and intimidation,” prosecutors said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.