WASHINGTON—District Judge Tanya Chutkan opposed the request by prosecutors to bar former President Donald Trump from revealing non-sensitive evidence provided to him by the prosecutors ahead of the trial on whether he conspired to illegally obstruct the counting of the 2020 electoral votes.
During an Aug. 11 hearing in Washington, she decided to issue a gag order that only forbids the release of information prosecutors label as sensitive.
The prosecutors, with the office of special counsel Jack Smith, requested a blanket gag order, citing concerns over safety and intimidation of witnesses.
The judge questioned the defense over the potential use of non-sensitive information to intimidate witnesses.
President Trump’s lawyer, John Lauro, a former federal prosecutor himself, responded that President Trump will abide by the pre-trial conditions, which already prohibit witness intimidation. He stressed that it’s the prosecutors’ job to prove why such a abroad restriction of the 45th president’s First Amendment rights is necessary.
He noted that the burden on President Trump’s rights is already significant, given that it’s up to the prosecutors to decide what information is and isn’t sensitive.
Federal prosecutor Thomas Windom said that most of the information ready to be handed over to the defense, over 11 million pages and files, will be marked as sensitive.
Mr. Lauro mentioned several times that President Trump is in the middle of an election campaign, but the judge refused to take that into account.
Mr. Windom suggested that President Trump was planning to release information before trial that could taint the jury pool in an effort to try the case in the media.
Mr. Lauro said that public speech isn’t grounds for a gag order.
The judge ultimately made the point that if President Trump would try to intimidate witnesses, there would be other mechanisms to address it—it could affect the conditions of his pre-trial release.
By Petr Svab and Jackson Richman
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