District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s move to limit President Trump’s access to materials relating to the criminal case against him and mute his public voice before and during the trial suggests that the Manhattan prosecutor is playing hardball against the former president. The government is invoking the Mar-a-Lago classified documents dispute as a reason Mr. Trump can’t be trusted with certain sensitive information 

That reality snapped into focus with the filing by one of Mr. Bragg’s deputies, Catherine McCaw, of a “protective order” that asks for the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, to limit both what Mr. Trump can say about it on social media and mandate that his lawyers be present when certain materials are presented to him. 

The motion comes after negotiations between Mr. Bragg’s office and Mr. Trump’s attorneys broke down, prompting the prosecutor to move ex parte, or unilaterally. Months before a trial, it offers a portrait of how Gotham prosecutors see America’s most famous defendant. It amounts to a prescription for guardrails between the former president, the case against him, and the public.   

Ms. McCaw, writing on Mr. Bragg’s behalf, argues that Mr. Trump has a “longstanding and perhaps singular history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, trial jurors, grand jurors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him, putting those individuals and their families at considerable safety risk.”

While the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, indicated at Mr. Trump’s arraignment his disinclination to impose a gag order on the defendant, the filing asks for something akin to it: a ban on “disseminating or posting” anything relating to the case “to any news or social media platforms, including, but not limited, to Truth Social, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, or YouTube, without prior approval from the Court.” 

Ms. McCaw reaches as far back as the Mueller investigation and as recent as the indictment in this case to find Mr. Trump’s engagement with “numerous social media attacks on individuals associated with the investigation, ranging from the prominent to the obscure.”

The issue of Mr. Trump’s social media posts has emerged in the writer E.  Jean Carroll’s suit against the former president, who has not attended the proceedings but has criticized them online. The presiding judge in that case, Lewis Kaplan, called those posts “a public statement that, on the face of it, seems entirely inappropriate” and warned that Mr. Trump “may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability.” 

Ms. McCaw’s request goes further than asking Mr. Trump be prohibited from sharing documents and materials with the masses. It requests that he be allowed to view them “only in the presence of Defense Counsel,” meaning his lawyers, and asks for Judge Merchan to rule that he cannot “copy, photograph, transcribe, or otherwise independently possess” what the motion calls the “Limited Dissemination Materials,” or especially sensitive materials.

It is not only documents that Mr. Bragg’s office seeks to chaperone. The protective order also seeks to block Mr. Trump from “learning the identity of  the District Attorney of New York support staff” who will be handling his case, aside from the named prosecutors. These could include paralegals, assistants, and other employees. 

One of Mr. Bragg’s requests goes so far as to demand that when it comes to the content of two cellphones, “only Defense Counsel will be authorized to view the full forensic images,” not Mr. Trump himself. The government argues that much of the content on these phones  is “highly personal in nature, including text messages with friends and family, vacation photos, and other materials that would be invasive for others to see.”   

That includes, apparently, Mr. Trump himself, who faces jail time should he be convicted. Ms. McCaw allows, “Should Defense Counsel wish to share certain portions of the forensic images with the Defendant, they should first notify the People and may share the materials with the Defendant only if the People do not object.” In other words, Mr. Bragg gets a veto. 

To justify the shackles it seeks to impose on Mr. Trump, the protective order notes that the former president has “been the subject of several  investigations during and after his time in office,” and that he has “posted extensively regarding these investigations on social media and has discussed these investigations in speeches, at political rallies, and during television appearances.”   

In a startling aside, Ms. McCaw cites another case against Mr. Trump as justification for requiring his lawyers to be present for him to review documents, observing that Mr. Trump is “currently under federal investigation for his handling of classified materials,” and thus deserving of restriction in this state case. The reference is to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the trove of documents at Mar-a-Lago, a probe transpiring in another jurisdiction. 

Ms. McCaw cites New York’s code of criminal procedure for the proposition that, “Upon a showing of good cause by either party, the court may at any time order that discovery or inspection of any kind of material or information under this article be denied, restricted, conditioned or deferred.” Mr. Trump’s behavior, she intimates, is all the “good cause” needed.

That provision abridges what is known as the Brady Rule after a Supreme Court case of that name. It is, justices have elaborated, a requirement of constitutional due process that the government must turn over all evidence that is both material and possibly exculpatory to the defendant.     

A note of caution is sounded to the Sun, though, by a veteran litigator, James Bopp Jr., who calls the vision for the case laid out in this motion “perplexing” given the demands of the Constitution’s Confrontation Clause, which ordains that the criminal defendant is entitled to “be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Mr. Bopp adds that the restrictions envisioned by Mr. Bragg could amount to a ban on Mr. Trump “participating in his own defense.”