Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith has made a new argument to impose a gag order on former President Donald Trump in his classified documents case by displaying death threats from the former president’s most ardent supporters.
According to Law & Crime, Smith attempted to justify his demand for a gag order by showing some of the most egregious death threats Trump supporters made to judges and prosecutors. Smith is seeking to prevent the ex-president from lying about "FBI agents intending to murder him and his family" during the DOJ's 2022 search for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.
In his filing, Smith showed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — whom Trump appointed to the federal judiciary in 2020 — threats to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron.
Law & Crime described the threats as "vile," and Smith said the gag order was necessary as his rhetoric could "pose a significant, imminent and foreseeable danger to the law enforcement professionals."
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Smith's filing included dates of the death threats, and showed that they started pouring in shortly after Trump was indicted in the spring of 2023. Death threats from March of 2023 included ominous warnings like: "Leave Trump alone... or Bragg will get assassinated," and, "Just shoot Bragg in the head and he stops being a problem."
Another read, "If you lay a hand on President Trump or his family, friends, supporters or myself, my family or any patriot — instant death."
In the filing, Smith went on to show how Trump's rhetoric has motivated his most devoted followers to take matters into their own hands. Following the August 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid, Trump supporter Ricky Shiffer posted to Truth Social — the ex-president's social media platform — that "the courts are unfair and unconstitutional, all that is left is force." He went on to attack the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was shot dead after a standoff with law enforcement.
This latest filing comes on the heels of a separate court filing in Cannon's court, in which Smith warned that if Cannon fails to act quickly to impose a gag order on the ex-president, his words could incite action that may result in the deaths of law enforcement professionals.
"[J]ust last week, a supporter of Trump called an FBI agent associated with the Hunter Biden case and claimed that, if Trump wins reelection, FBI agents will be thrown in jail; and if he does not win, the agents will be ‘hunt[ed] down’ and ‘slaughter[ed]’ in their own homes, after which ‘[w]e’re going to slaughter your whole f—ing family,'” Smith wrote in a June 21 filing. “No court would tolerate another defendant deliberately creating such immediate risks to the safety of law enforcement, and this Court should not wait for a tragic event before taking action in this case."
READ MORE: 'We will kill you all': Trump supporters send 'upsetting' death threats to Manhattan DA
Smith's request for a gag order came after a Truth Social post in which Trump baselessly claimed that President Joe Biden's DOJ "AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE" against him. The former president's claim is based on standard language for FBI searches, which states that agents are authorized to use deadly force if they find themselves in a life-or-death situation while executing a search warrant.
During a press conference in May, Attorney General Merrick Garland clarified that there was no plot to assassinate Trump, and that the former president was disingenuously riling up his supporters with "extremely dangerous" rhetoric.
"The document that is being referred to in the investigation is a Justice Department standard policy limiting the use of force," Garland said at the time. "As the FBI advises, it is part of the standard operations plan for searches, and in fact it was even used in the consensual search of President Biden."
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