WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — A federal appeals court temporarily froze a gag order against former President Donald Trump on Friday after his legal team filed an emergency motion to lift the order.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered on November 3 that the gag order imposed on President Trump by Obama-appointed federal Judge Tanya Chutkan last month be suspended to allow for time to consider the emergency motion for a stay on the order.
The appellate panel wrote that the purpose of the stay “is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”
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The wide-ranging gag order, requested by special counsel Jack Smith, requires that Trump refrain from “publicly making statements, or directing others to make statements that ‘target’” Smith and his legal teams, court personnel, and any “reasonably foreseeable’ potential witnesses or their testimony in the case,” The Epoch Times noted.
The order has been slammed by both his legal defense and commentators as an infringement upon his First Amendment right to express his opinion.
Writing for The Federalist about the gag order, Shawn Fleetwood asserted that “Corrupt left-wing judges’” regulation of Republicans’ campaign speech is reminiscent of a “banana republic.”
The legal battle concerns a four-count indictment handed down by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 1 alleging that Trump committed conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights when he objected to the certification of the 2020 election.
While Judge Chutkan had previously paused the gag order to allow the defense and prosecution to both present briefings, she reimposed the order on October 30.
Trump’s attorneys then filed an emergency motion on Thursday to lift the gag order, saying that it violates the former president’s First Amendment rights as well as those of “over 100 million Americans who listen to him.”
President Trump’s “uniquely powerful voice has been a fixture of American political discourse for eight years, and central to the American fabric for decades,” his lawyers wrote in the filing.
Oral arguments regarding the gag order are scheduled for November 20.
President Trump’s attorneys have said that the DOJ has “submitted no evidence of any actual or imminent threat to the administration of justice.”
“The prosecution’s claim that his core political speech suddenly poses a threat to the administration of justice is baseless. The prosecutors and potential witnesses addressed by President Trump’s speech are high-level government officials and public figures, many of whom routinely attack President Trump in their own public statements, media interviews, and books,” they wrote in court filings.
Legal commentators Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School, has said the order is not only a threat to free speech, but an act of hypocrisy by Judge Chutkan.
According to Turley, Trump’s gag order requires “a level of restraint that Judge Chutkan herself has failed to show in the past. For example, in sentencing a rioter in 2022, Chutkan said that the rioters ‘were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man – not to the Constitution.’”
She went on to claim, “[i]t’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day,” suggesting that President Trump should have been jailed, even though he was not part of that case.
“That would seem to imply the guilt of an individual who was not even charged. Yet Chutkan has refused to recuse herself in now trying the very man she was referencing as responsible for the crimes of that day,” wrote Turley.
Months ago, released White House visitor logs suggested that the Biden administration is driving the prosecution of President Trump in what has been described as a “bombshell” revelation.
Fox News host Jesse Watters shared the discovery that Jay Bratt, the “top aide” to special counsel Jack Smith, “was summoned to the White House twice in the fall of 2021 to meet with Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff, Carolyn Saba, and an adviser to the chief of staff, Katherine Riley,” while serving as a Department of Justice official.
According to Watters, Bratt “lobbied the Biden White House to raid Mar-a-Lago,” and Biden and his White House counsel subsequently “signed off on revoking” Trump’s executive privilege.
Weeks later, FBI agents received a warrant from a “Trump-hating” judge who was also an Obama donor to target Trump over the alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Bratt was then “tapped to be the top aide for special counsel Jack Smith” and “summoned” back to the Biden White House to again meet with Biden’s deputy chief of staff in March, recounted Watters.
Weeks later, Trump was indicted over the classified documents held at his Mar-a-Lago residence.