FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — 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.
Prosecutors say those restrictions are necessary after Trump falsely claimed last month that the FBI was prepared to kill him when it searched his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents two years ago. But prosecutor David Harbach, a member of Smith’s team, encountered immediate pushback from U.S.
District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee whose handling of the case has generated intense scrutiny and has contributed to delays that make a trial before the November presidential election a virtual impossibility. 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. “I'm trying to make sure that whatever condition is contemplated is consistent with the First Amendment,” she said, later adding that there needs .
