In a case involving sensitive materials, Trump’s attorneys ask the judge to declare the prosecutors in contempt and deny their request for a gag order.

TFD – Attorneys for former President Donald Trump are fighting a request for a gag order in the secret documents case, calling it unconstitutional. Special counsel Jack Smith’s office seeks to limit Trump’s public statements about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. The case adds another layer to Trump’s ongoing legal battles.

Attorneys for former President Donald Trump requested on Monday that a federal judge deny special counsel Jack Smith’s request for a gag order in the case involving secret data and hold federal prosecutors responsible for writing the request in contempt.

Smith’s office has asked Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge presiding over the case involving secret materials, to impose a gag order on the former president, restricting his capacity to discuss in public the details of the law enforcement raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022.

The presumed Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has falsely and repeatedly attacked the FBI for having a policy against using lethal force during the search, which the agency follows with every warrant it executes.

Attorneys for Trump attacked the gag order request as a “extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship application” to stifle Trump’s speech in his presidential campaign in a scathing court brief that was submitted late on Memorial Day.

Defense lawyers wrote that the special counsel “improperly asks the Court to impose an unconstitutional gag order on President Trump… based on vague and unsupported assertions about threats to law enforcement personnel whose names have been redacted from public filings and whose identities are already subject to a protective order.”

The attorneys also said that prosecutors, whom they referred to as “self-appointed Thought Police,” were “seeking to condition President Trump’s liberty on his compliance” with their own views.

Smith’s request to include the gag order in the former president’s pre-trial release conditions—which would have required a probation officer, not a judge, to determine whether Trump’s remarks violated the agreement—was one of the aspects of the proposed gag order that Trump’s attorneys contested the most. According to their written description, that arrangement would “need the Probation Office and the Court to mediate disputes against a backdrop of potentially imprisoning a political opponent who is successfully defeating Smith’s boss and preferred candidate.”

According to Trump’s team, Cannon ought to punish “all government attorneys who participated in the decision to file the Motion” in addition to turning down the gag order request.

In addition, the former president is subject to a gag order in his ongoing hush money prosecution in New York state court and in the federal election meddling case in Washington, DC.

Five law enforcement officials, some of whom may testify in the case involving the sensitive papers, were put in jeopardy by Trump’s false assertions, according to the special counsel on Friday. “It invites the sort of threats and harassment that have occurred when other participants in legal proceedings against Trump have been targeted by his invective,” the prosecutors said in response to his remarks.

Claims that the operation’s search strategy at Mar-a-Lago was special in some way and that Trump’s life was in jeopardy, as the former president has stated, have been refuted by the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland. In a statement last week, the FBI stated that “no one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter,” while Garland described the accusation as “false” and “extremely dangerous.”

The same deadly force policy was part of the plans prior to President Joe Biden’s Delaware home being searched as part of a different inquiry into his handling of confidential papers, as both Garland and the FBI have pointed out.