June 15 (UPI) — Donald Trump‘s lawyers pushed back at special counsel Jack Smith’s efforts to bar him from making inflammatory statements about federal agents in his classified documents case in Florida.
In a 20-page filing Friday, the former president’s attorneys argued Smith seeks to stifle Trump’s remarks about the FBI ahead of his first debate with President Joe Biden on June 27 and the Republican National Convention on July 15.
“The motion is a naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution,” the lawyers said in the filing.
Smith’s office asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in May to revise Trump’s conditions of release in the case to bar him from making continued claims that FBI agents were prepared to kill him when they raided his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., for classified documents in August 2022.
A recently unsealed order for the Mar-a-Lago search included language that instructed agents to use lethal force only in cases of extreme danger, but Trump suggested the order gave agents permission to kill him on sight.
The FBI has said deadly force authorizations are standard language designed to limit the use of force.
Smith’s said Trump’s mischaracterization “endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case.”
Trump’s lawyers argued he had only criticized the Mar-a-Lago raid “in a manner that someone in the government disagreed with and does not like” and that Smith’s request should be denied based on the “ambiguities, lack of enforcement criteria, and resulting chilling effect.”
They also said no FBI agents involved in the raid “submitted an affidavit, or even an argument, claiming that President Trump’s remarks put them at risk.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing the government’s attempts to retrieve them.
Cannon scheduled a hearing on Smith’s gag order request for June 24 in Fort Pierce, Fla., just three days before the presidential debate. It’s unclear when she will rule on the competing requests.
Trump’s legal team last week also asked Judge Juan Merchan to terminate the gag order against him in his New York hush money trial after he was convicted on all 34 felony accounts.