Aileen Cannon hands Trump weeks to argue against latest gag order demand

Judge Aileen Cannon, the jurist presiding over special counsel Jack Smith's criminal case against Trump for storing highly classified national defense information, is giving the former president two weeks to rebut Smith's request to impose a gag order.

According to Law & Crime, she "ordered up a Trump team response by June 14 on the issue of Smith’s motion to modify his bond conditions.

"The special counsel first raised the issue on Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, saying that Trump’s Truth Social posts claiming the DOJ authorized 'deadly (lethal) force' when searching Mar-a-Lago amounted to a 'dangerous campaign to smear law enforcement' and put potential federal witnesses at risk."

The conspiracy theory that the FBI was planning to assassinate Trump, which has also been pushed by far-right members of Congress, originated from a right-wing social media influencer who misinterpreted a piece of language in FBI documents about authorization for deadly force during the 2022 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago property for the missing classified documents.

The deadly force language is in fact standard in every FBI search procedure as a matter of policy. It was also used during searches of President Joe Biden's home.

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The issuance of gag orders against Trump has been common in several of his other civil and criminal cases after the former president attacked various witnesses and court officers, including in one instance the daughter of the judge overseeing his criminal trial in Manhattan — all of which put people's lives in danger and raised the risk of witness intimidation.

However, Cannon, a Trump-appointed judge who has been controversial for her repeated decisions that appear to bias the classified documents trial in favor of Trump, has dragged out the process.

This comes after she postponed the entire trial indefinitely, citing the number of unresolved pretrial motions, many of which she sat on for months without action — a development that all but guarantees the case cannot be heard until after November. If he wins the election, Trump could simply order the case dismissed.

Smith has so far not asked for Cannon's removal. However, a number of outside parties have filed complaints with the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit over Cannon's management of the trial, which have been largely rejected by arch-conservative Chief Judge William Pryor.