Judge Aileen Cannon could rule as soon as Monday on a motion to impose a gag order on President Trump in the Florida classified documents prosecution being led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. In a filing asking for the gag order on Friday, Mr. Smith says a recent threat made against the FBI by a Trump supporter supports the notion that restrictions on the former president’s speech are necessary. 

“Defendant Donald J. Trump made a series of false and inflammatory public statements about the law enforcement professionals who conducted the court-authorized search at Mar-a-Lago, telling his audience that the FBI was out to kill him and his family,” Mr. Smith’s team wrote in its motion requesting the gag order. “Trump knew that this was false, and he intended that his comments would inflame his listeners; indeed, that was the whole purpose.”

“Comments like those create an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement professionals — men and women who dedicate themselves to enforcing the law and protecting the American public every day, and who are entitled to do their work without fear of violent retribution,” Mr. Smith continued. 

Mr. Smith’s office argues that the motion for a gag order is extremely narrow, asking that the former president be barred only from using dangerous rhetoric or inciting violence against federal law enforcement. Mr. Smith says he is content to have Trump use his political speech to criticize both the Justice Department and the Biden administration more broadly — just not the career law enforcement officials working on the case. 

The prosecutors argue that Trump is “struggling to dilute, parse, and reinterpret his false and intentionally inflammatory comments in order to justify them; but there is no question that his statements were intentionally false, that they were designed to inflame and anger his audience, and that he knew that his statements would do so.”

A string of violent acts and threats have followed since Trump’s property was searched in August 2023. First, a Trump supporter attacked an FBI field office in Ohio with a nail gun only to later be killed by responding law enforcement. More recently, Mr. Smith’s office says a Trump supporter called an FBI agent involved with the prosecution of Hunter Biden, which resulted in a conviction. The unnamed man allegedly told the agent that he would be jailed should Trump return to the White House, or would be killed if Trump is defeated in November. 

“While Trump boastfully acknowledges the impact that his words have on his listeners, he will just as predictably decline any responsibility for their actions should any further violence take place,” Mr. Smith says. 

A number of Republicans have bashed judges for imposing these kinds of limited gag orders in the past. During the hush money case in New York, Republicans flocked to the courthouse to support their presumptive nominee, appearing before microphones outside of the building after each day’s proceedings to say things the former president was legally prohibited from saying. 

“We’re here to have his back,” Congressman Bob Good said in May outside of the courthouse. “We’re here to defend him and to tell the truth about this travesty of justice, this political persecution, this election interference, this rigging of elections.”

State politicians are now trying that tactic in Judge Cannon’s courtroom. On June 17, two dozen Republican state attorneys general wrote in an amicus brief to Judge Cannon demanding that Trump be allowed to say whatever he wants about the federal prosecutors. “The free-speech right is at its strongest when it protects political speech,” the amicus brief says.

“Special prosecutor Jack Smith, on behalf of the United States, asks this court to curtail that right by ordering a prior restraint on President Trump’s constitutionally protected speech. Such an order is presumptively unconstitutional,” the document continues. The 24 officials say that a gag order would “prevent the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States from speaking out against the prosecution and the criminal trial process that seek to take away his liberty.”