Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team are continuing to push for a formal order restricting former President Donald Trump’s public statements related to the federal criminal case that Smith brought over the former president’s attempts to stay in power. In a new filing in federal court, Smith’s team points to recent statements from Trump that they characterize as targeting established witnesses in the case.
The examples are wide-ranging, including comments made by Trump about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. “The need for the proposed order is further evidenced by a review of the defendant’s prejudicial statements in the weeks since the Government initially filed its motion on September 5,” the filing said. “Since that date, the defendant has continued to make statements that pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case and that fall within the narrowly tailored order proposed by the Government.”
The reference to “prejudice” means something that could substantively set back the orderly handling of this case. Prejudicing the jury pool, aka communicating potentially swaying arguments to possible jurors outside the ordinarily strict confines of the actual trial, is among the concerns for prosecutors. The statements “could cause potential jurors to develop views about the propriety of the prosecution, an improper consideration for a juror prior to trial,” prosecutors said. They emphasized that potentially negative impacts from Trump’s commentary therefore extended beyond any direct threats to the people who Trump is naming, though that’s also an issue. The threats to life and safety faced by some of those investigating or otherwise on the opposite side of Trump have been well documented nationwide.
The specific statements from Trump about which Smith’s team raised those concerns include a claim that Barr feared impeachment so didn’t follow what he supposedly should’ve been pursuing in power. Trump also misrepresented comments from Raffensperger, who the former president erroneously claimed to have characterized him as doing nothing wrong on a post-2020 election call.
