Jack Smith Tuesday called for a gag order against Donald Trump to be reissued after the former president doubled down on threats against the special counsel’s family, according to court filings and reports.
Smith filed a 67-page motion with a Washington federal appeals court requesting Judge Tanya Chutkan’s suspended gag order, appealed by Trump, be reinstated to curtail attacks on prosecutors and witnesses, Politico was among the first to report.
In the filing, Smith’s team likened Trump’s social media rants to a famous request made by a medieval king that led to his former lord chancellor’s death.
“Targeted disparagement of this sort poses a danger even when it does not explicitly call for harassment or violence,” the filing states. “Repeated attacks are often understood as a signal to act—just as King Henry II’s remark, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ resulted in Thomas à Becket’s murder.”
The filing also cites a violent threat, which includes racial and gendered slurs, that one of his followers phoned into the district court’s chambers: “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.”
(The accused caller was subsequently arrested, the New York Times reported at the time.)
The filing arrives less than a week before a three-judge panel will consider the Chutkun's gag order in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Nov. 20, the New York Times notes.
Chutkan is overseeing the federal election fraud case filed in Washington D.C. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Trump’s challenge to court-issued gag orders relies heavily on his status as a frontrunner in the 2024 presidential campaign and protections the Constitution provides political speech.
Prosecutors argued Tuesday that Chutkan’s gag order does not prevent Trump from speaking publicly about the Biden administration or claiming he’s being prosecuted unfairly.
“But, like every other criminal defendant, he does not have ‘carte blanche to vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants,’” the filing states.
“He may not ‘launch a pretrial smear campaign against participating government staff, their families, and foreseeable witnesses.’”
