The problem with Donald Trump’s latest effort to recycle his “deadly force” lie is not just the fact that it’s dangerous nonsense. The problem is all the more notable because of the former president’s curious timing. The New Republic took note of the Republican’s latest fundraising appeal to supporters.
On Monday, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee escalated his claims that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to shoot and kill him during its 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, this time promising to punish his two-time opponent for the alleged assassination attempt.
“Biden’s day of reckoning is coming,” Trump wrote in the written message to prospective donors. The appeal added that the incumbent Democratic president “tried to raid my home and take me out with deadly force … but he failed.”
In reality, of course, that never happened — but if the lie seems familiar, there’s a good reason for that.
To briefly recap, it was two weeks ago when the felon, referencing newly unsealed court records, claimed by way of his social media platform that the Justice Department “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” while executing a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Trump issued an outlandish fundraising appeal soon after, falsely claiming that Biden was “locked & loaded” and “ready to take me out” during the FBI’s search of his glorified country club.
After the claims were thoroughly and completely discredited — and the FBI itself took the unusual step of issuing a public statement leaving no doubt that the former president and his allies simply had no idea what they were talking about — Trump repeated the claim anyway. The presumptive GOP nominee is now recycling the lie once again.
The truth was entirely mundane: The FBI’s relevant paperwork included standard language, used every time the bureau executes a court-approved search warrant. Indeed, when the FBI searched Biden’s home in Delaware as part of a separate search for classified documents, the paperwork included the same phrasing. This obviously does not mean that the Biden administration was “ready to take out” the Democratic incumbent himself.
But for prosecutors, this was more than just a lie: It was a lie that endangered the lives of law enforcement officials. With this in mind, special counsel Jack Smith’s office asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to limit what the Republican can say in this case that might endanger law enforcement officials for no reason.
Cannon balked for procedural reasons, but told prosecutors they could try again. As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained yesterday, Smith’s office did exactly that late last week.
In other words, within days of prosecutors telling a judge that Trump is pushing a dangerous lie that threatens law enforcement, Trump and his political operation decided it’d be a good idea to once again push the same dangerous lie that threatens law enforcement.
For their part, the former president’s lawyers have pushed back against Smith’s gag-order request. The defense attorneys haven’t bothered to argue that Trump’s lie is true — they obviously know better — but they have insisted that the Republican should be free to repeat the lie with impunity.
The matter is now in the hands of Cannon, a Trump-appointed conservative who’s been accused of repeatedly slow-walking the process in the classified-documents case in order to help the defendant’s 2024 campaign. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
