Jack Smith Blasts Donald Trump’s ‘Egregious’ Threats in New Filing

In a Friday filing in Donald Trump’s classified documents case in Florida, Department of Justice (DOJ) Special Counsel Jack Smith lists specific threats the former president has made, calling them “egregious.”

Trump is expected to stand trial after being indicted last June by the DOJ on 40 federal charges, alleging that he illegally retained classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021 and obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them. Trump’s indictment came after the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in August 2022. The former president has pleaded not guilty and said the case is politically motivated.

In a court filing on Friday, Smith urged Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the case, to allow his request to have Trump under a gag order as he cited threats to support his case. The special counsel also claimed Trump’s previous statements pose “imminent danger.”

In the filing, Smith detailed specific threats he traced to Trump’s previous statements related to the DOJ, calling them “egregious.”

Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s spokesperson via email for comment.

“Trump’s recent posts falsely insinuating that the FBI and DOJ had planned to assassinate him during the search at Mar-a-Lago are even more egregious,” Smith wrote in the filing. “Deploying such knowingly false and inflammatory language in the combustible atmosphere that Trump has created poses an imminent danger to law enforcement that must be addressed before more violence occurs.”

Smith continues to cite specific statements Trump has made on social media, adding that the former president’s posts contain “clear allusions to violence.”

“Trump, for his part, has ‘repeatedly’ made ‘threatening public statements,’ including a message of vengeance the day after his initial appearance in court… His rhetoric on social media also contains clear allusions to violence. On September 22, 2023, on Truth Social, the defendant falsely claimed that a witness, the retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had committed treason and intimated that he should be executed,” Smith added.

This comes after Smith filed a motion last month seeking a gag order days after Trump suggested that the FBI hoped to assassinate him during the August 2022 document seizure at Mar-a-Lago.

In response, Trump’s legal team claimed that Smith’s proposed order is designed to “restrict President Donald Trump’s campaign speech as the first presidential debate approaches at the end of this month.”

A court filing was unsealed in May showing briefing notes for the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, which said: “Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice [DOJ] may use deadly force when necessary.”

In response, a Trump campaign email was sent to supporters in late May that claimed that FBI agents were “authorized to shoot” Trump and “itching to do the unthinkable” during the raid, while the former president also claimed in a series of Truth Social posts that the DOJ under President Joe Biden had authorized his assassination.

The FBI issued a statement that revealed Trump’s claims were a misrepresentation of the “Law Enforcement Operations Order” memo.

“The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the FBI said in a May 22 statement. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

On Monday, Cannon, a Trump appointee frequently accused of bias favoring the former president, was slated to hold a hearing on Smith’s motion.