Donald Trump’s visit to a South Carolina gun store last week raised questions about what happened, exactly, and whether he broke any laws in the process. Remember, a Trump spokesman initially said the former president, who is facing several criminal indictments, purchased a gun during the campaign stop, only to walk back the claim later that day.
Well, we may learn more about that visit, thanks to special counsel Jack Smith raising the incident in his latest filing in Trump’s federal election interference case in Washington, D.C.
Smith’s filing on Friday to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan reiterated the government’s request for a “narrow” limit on Trump’s “extrajudicial statements” — that is, a gag order — in response to the former president’s opposition to it.
Against the backdrop of Trump suggesting Gen. Mark Milley should be executed for treason, prosecutors took stock of the fact that “no other criminal defendant would be permitted to issue public statements insinuating that a known witness in his case should be executed; this defendant should not be, either.”
Smith pointed out that Trump makes incendiary statements, only to then have other people say he didn’t mean what he said, to lesser fanfare than the initial incendiary statement.
In their filing to Chutkan, prosecutors highlighted Trump’s Aug. 4 Truth Social post that said: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Though his campaign later downplayed the threat, prosecutors explained: “The truth is clear: the defendant was caught making a public threat and then had a spokesperson issue an excuse.”
It’s there that the gun incident also fits in, according to the special counsel.
After making that broader point, prosecutors dropped a footnote telling Chutkan that Trump “was caught potentially violating his conditions of release, and tried to walk that back in similar fashion.”
They explained that a Trump spokesman had tweeted that Trump purchased a Glock handgun but later deleted the post. The spokesman, perhaps after realizing the tweet doubled as a confession, later issued a statement claiming Trump “did not purchase or take possession of the firearm.” Of course, as prosecutors made clear, that claim was “directly contradicted by the video showing the defendant possessing the pistol.” Noting that Trump nonetheless later reposted a video of the incident from one of his followers, which approvingly cited the claimed gun purchase (that his spokesman disclaimed), prosecutors wrote that Trump “either purchased a gun in violation of the law and his conditions of release, or seeks to benefit from his supporters’ mistaken belief that he did so.” Citing 18 U.S.C. § 922(n) — a federal law that says people under indictment can’t receive firearms shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce — Smith’s team wrote that it “would be a separate federal crime, and thus a violation of the defendant’s conditions of release, for him to purchase a gun while this felony indictment is pending.” So, what will Chutkan, who just rejected Trump’s attempt to kick her off the case, do with this information and the broader gag order issue? She set a hearing for Oct. 16, so we may learn more at that time what the Obama appointee thinks about all of this — and what, if anything, she intends to do about it.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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