Prosecutor in classified documents case clashes with judge over request to restrict Trump’s speech

FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A federal prosecutor in the classified documents case of Donald Trump clashed with the judge Monday as he faced skeptical questioning over a request to bar the former president from making threatening comments about law enforcement agents involved in the investigation. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is seeking to make as a condition of Trump’s freedom pending trial a prohibition on remarks that could endanger FBI agents participating in the case. The judge questioned Harbach about how she could fashion an order that did not run afoul of Trump’s free speech rights, whether FBI agents were sufficiently protected if their names were withheld from court documents and how prosecutors could prove a direct link between Trump’s comments and any resulting harm to the public. At one point, as Harbach tried despite frequent interruptions from Cannon to rattle off the multiple rationales that he said existed for speech restrictions on Trump, the visibly exasperated prosecutor noted acidly that “I’ve got one reason out so far.” The comment drew a rebuke from Cannon, who said, “Mr. Trump was referencing boilerplate language from FBI policy that prohibits the use of deadly force during the execution of search warrants except when the officer conducting the search has a reasonable belief that the “subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” Trump falsely claimed in a fundraising email that the Biden administration was “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” Prosecutors argued that such comments are part of a pattern of Trump speech that animates his base against law enforcement, citing as examples an attempted attack on an FBI office in Ohio three days after the Mar-a-Lago search and the more recent arrest of a Trump supporter accused of threatening an FBI agent who investigated Biden’s son, Hunter.