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The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida has ruled on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for a gag order to be placed on the former president, similar to those placed on him by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., and New York judges in his Manhattan cases.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon denied Smith’s motion to impose a gag order that would prevent Trump from criticizing him and certain aspects of the case. Investigative reporter Julie Kelly first reported on the order, which stated that Smith’s request was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.”
Cannon noted Smith’s failure to give Trump’s attorneys enough time to consider the motion.
“Sufficient time needs to be afforded to permit reasonable evaluation of the requested relief by opposing counsel… Because the filing of the Special Counsel’s Motion did not adhere to these basic requirements, it is due to be denied without prejudice,” she wrote.
Cannon warned Special Counsel Jack Smith that he risks sanctions if he continues to bury evidence in footnotes rather than including it as addendums to his filings.
Additionally, Smith will be required to include unbiased statements from Trump’s defense team, limited to 200 words, in each filing.
BREAKING: Judge Cannon, as expected, denies Jack Smith’s proposed gag order, warns sanctions could be next if he keeps violating the rules. pic.twitter.com/T2Yxb1zvm6
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 28, 2024
Trump is putting pressure on Joe Biden’s Justice Department to take legal action against Smith following an explosive admission in a legal filing.
Smith’s prosecutors informed Cannon earlier this month that some evidence is no longer in its “original, intact” form, prompting outrage from Trump.
“Arrest deranged Jack Smith. He is a criminal,” Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social as one of several posts he made over the weekend after Smith’s prosecutors informed Cannon that there are some boxes where the “order of items within that box is not the same” as they appear in digital scans of materials in the wake of the FBI retrieving them from Trump’s Florida resort in August 2022.
The filing addressed defendant Walt Nauta’s request for additional time to learn the contents and organization of the documents seized. It specifically identified which documents were in which boxes and the correct sequence of the documents within those boxes. Smith’s filing noted that the current order of the boxes doesn’t match scans of them that were made earlier, which is a problem, according to legal experts.
Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants’ review of the boxes,” the Justice Department prosecutors wrote.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the filing added.
Smith’s prosecutors then admitted they had misled the court.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” said the filing.
“Legal experts told Just the News the revelation could prove to be a serious problem for prosecutors and a violation of court rules to preserve evidence in the state it was seized,” Just the News noted.
In another Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “It has always been clear that the ‘Documents Case’ is nothing but an Election Interference Scam concocted by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and their Hacks and Thugs,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Now, Deranged Jack has admitted in a filing in front of Judge Cannon to what I have been saying happened since the Illegal RAID on my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida — That he and his team committed blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case.
“These deeply Illegal actions by the Politicized ‘Persecutors’ mandate that this whole Witch Hunt be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. END THE ‘BOXES HOAXES.’ MAGA2024!”
