Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a South Dakota Republican party rally in Rapid City, South Dakota, U.S. September 8, 2023.Â
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump on Friday attacked special counsel Jack Smith as a “deranged” prosecutor after his office sought restrictions on what the previous president can say about his federal election interference case.
“He’s a deranged person,” he said of Smith, who led two federal investigations into Trump which have yielded criminal indictments.
Trump, who’s the leading Republican candidate for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, claimed in a speech Friday night that Smith “wants to remove my rights under the First Amendment.”
He “wants to remove my right to talk freely and openly,” Trump said on the conference of a conservative Christian women’s organization in Washington, D.C.
Trump has previously attacked Smith in similar terms, but his latest broadside got here hours after Smith asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for a partial gag order within the D.C. election case.
Trump is charged with 4 criminal counts in that case, which alleges he perpetrated multiple conspiracies to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden within the 2020 election.
Trump’s repeated attacks on the court, the prosecutors, prospective witnesses and the residents of D.C. threaten to “undermine the integrity of those proceedings and prejudice the jury pool,” Smith wrote in a court filing.
The special counsel said he seeks “a narrow, well-defined restriction” on “certain prejudicial extrajudicial statements.”
Those would come with statements concerning the “identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses,” in addition to “statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors which can be disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating,” Smith wrote.
“They need to silence me because I won’t ever allow them to silence you,” Trump told the D.C. crowd.
Smith’s motion cites quite a few social media posts from Trump’s Truth Social account railing against Chutkan, the prosecutors and town of D.C. itself. The filing also accused Trump of spreading “knowingly false accusations of misconduct” against a prosecutor within the special counsel’s office who’s working on Trump’s other federal criminal case in Florida.
Trump claimed that the prosecutor went to the White House for “improper reasons” before Trump was indicted in that case, which centers on his retention of classified national defense records after he was now not president.
But “because the defendant well knows,” the prosecutor “conducted a routine investigative interview of a profession military official at that official’s duty station — the White House,” Smith wrote, calling Trump’s claim otherwise “an try to prejudice the general public and the venire prematurely of trial.”
The judge has yet to rule on Smith’s request, which if enacted could restrict Trump from disparaging the special counsel himself.
The speech was the primary of two that Trump was scheduled to make in D.C. on Friday night. He began speaking at the primary event, a gathering of the Concerned Women for America Legislative Motion Committee, about 40 minutes past his scheduled 7:15 p.m. ET start time, likely delaying his second appearance on the annual summit of the Family Research Council, one other religious conservative group.
The trip marked Trump’s first time back within the nation’s capital since early last month, when he appeared on the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse to plead not guilty within the federal election case.
