In federal court proceedings on Monday that resulted in the imposition of a limited gag order blocking comments from former President Donald Trump about figures including federal prosecutor Jack Smith, the presiding judge — Tanya Chutkan — was reported to have laughed at a lawyer for the former commander-in-chief after Trump’s representative claimed Trump was already compliant.
The Trump attorney, John Lauro, claimed to Chutkan that what the judge “put in place is working.” (This was before the order.) She didn’t agree. “The judge laughed loudly in response to Lauro’s statement, and told the attorney to stop making political arguments in her courtroom,” as reported by CNN. Per the same outlet’s reporting, that same dispute kept emerging in court, as Lauro tried to argue for the legitimacy of the political statements that Trump has been making and may continue to make, considering his ongoing run for president. “Every single issue that relates to this case also has political issues,” Lauro claimed. (It’s the election interference case.)
But it’s not just politics. Trump has used highly personalized, antagonistic language against some of the individuals he’s faced in court, like Smith, and there is a very clear historical precedent of the language Trump uses leading to real-world violence. “Just because the defendant is running a political campaign does not allow him to do whatever he wants,” Chutkan reportedly said.
Trump will still have many avenues for commenting about the case, including to argue his innocence. He’ll just be blocked from making certain public attacks on figures like witnesses. In past court filings, Smith’s team pointed for an example of the problem to the former president’s infamous recent commentary about Mark Milley, the newly retired general who until recently was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump made the extreme argument that there is a historical precedent for Milley’s execution — and Milley, mind you, is an established witness in the special counsel’s (Smith’s) investigation. Other concerning targets of Trump’s varying rhetoric include Georgia official Brad Raffensperger and Mike Pence.
