In a filing titled ominously “Government’s Opposed Motion To Ensure That Extrajudicial Statements Do Nor Prejudice These Proceedings,” Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team, after listing an absolute shit ton of angry, menacing posts and statements by fat former President Trump, request that DC Judge Tanya Chutkan “protect the due administration of justice in these proceedings and ensure the impartiality of the venire, the Government proposes two narrowly tailored orders that impose modest, permissible restrictions on prejudicial extrajudicial conduct by the parties and counsel,” and man, Trump is going to absolutely lose his shit over this one.
The first request is for a special order prohibiting “(a) statements regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses; and (b) statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating” and the second being a requirement that Trump’s team notify the court and the special counsel’s office that they’re conducting any sort of survey of local potential jurors. “The Government respectfully requests that the Court set forth a process to review efforts by either party to engage in contacts with members of the jury venire in this District undertaken for the purpose of discussing case-specific facts, including any pretrial survey, poll, focus group, or similar study,” Smith’s team wrote.
The whole filing is just going to cause a massive ketchup storm. On the fifth page Smith singles out Trump’s post trying to scare former Georgia Lt Gov Geoff Duncan from testifying to the Fulton County grand jury. Then on the next page he quotes Trump as calling Judge Chutkan “a fraud dressed up as a judge in Washington, D.C. who is a radical Obama hack.” On Page 10 Smith calls Trump out directly for knowingly lying about an interview one of his team members conducted at the White House, meeting with a career official about the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
There’s almost too much in here to cover without simply copying and pasting the whole thing, so give it a read and see just how badly this motion is going to enrage the fat Orange God Emperor.