19 State AGs Come Together to Help Trump: 'Our Citizens Have an Interest'
A Washington, D.C., federal court’s order limiting former President Donald Trump’s ability to comment on his trial does more than restrict the rights of the 45th president.
It restricts the right of all Americans to hear from arguably the most influential voice in modern American politics.
And now, 19 attorneys general from across the United States are weighing in to make that argument to the courts and to the country.
A friend of the court brief filed Tuesday by Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and joined by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey and 17 of their colleagues argues that Judge Tanya Chutkan’s gag order on Trump related to his trial in the D.C. circuit court went so far in denying Trump’s right to free speech that it denied the rights of countless millions of Americans to hear it.
“As administrators of free and fair elections, we have an interest in ensuring no illegal prior restraint is entered against any major political candidate. Indeed, our citizens have an interest in hearing from major political candidates in that election,” the brief declared. “The Order threatens the States’ interests by infringing on President Trump’s free speech right.”
Chutkan’s gag order, first issued Oct. 16, is ostensibly aimed at preventing Trump from presenting a danger to the “fair administration of justice,” as Chutkan put it in a ruling from the bench, according to ABC News.
An appeals court paused the gag order on Nov. 4, pending a full hearing on the topic scheduled for Nov. 20, according to the Daily Caller.
The state attorneys general who signed onto the friend of the court brief are all Republicans, but the issue is far from partisan.
In a statement Tuesday, Morrissey said the order conflicts with the foundational American right of free political discourse. He noted that even the American Civil Liberties Union has taken a stand against the order.
The ACLU is supposedly dedicated to fighting for constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — and even occasionally lives up to that billing. But the reality is, it’s been disgracefully leftist in its orientation for a generation or more.
“This is not just about Trump saying what he wants to say; it’s about protecting our constitutional right to free speech,” Morrissey said in the statement. “And when political foes join in a common defense, you know there’s something there:
“The ACLU, an organization on the opposite side of the GOP’s political spectrum, has sided with Trump in a brief arguing (among other things) ‘the gag order currently in place is insufficiently justified since it has not shown a serious threat that the speech it prohibits will threaten the administration of justice.’”
But what is serious is the threat the gag order presents to the American system of government.
Trump is, far and away, the biggest individual political challenge to President Joe Biden and his administration, and the biggest challenge to Biden’s re-election in 2024.
What is taking place with the legal warfare against him being waged by Democrats in New York and Georgia at the state level and in Florida and the District of Columbia by special counsel Jack Smith amounts to political prosecution on behalf of a partisan regime.
That’s especially true of the D.C. trial, where Trump is charged with four felony counts related to his challenges to the 2020 presidential election.
No honest person — Democrat or Republican — can deny that.
Democrats, however, either cynically pretend to believe, or may have even convinced themselves, that Trump is somehow a threat to the country in a way that an evidently corrupt Biden administration — helped into office by a dishonest intelligence community and in hock to foreign powers — is not.
They have the establishment media on their side, of course. The news organizations that waged relentless war on the Trump administration for four years can hardly be expected to admit their nearly criminal dishonesty now.
They have the cultural influence of Hollywood on their side, along with social media giants, universities, and obscenely wealthy leftists like George Soros.
And in Tanya Chutkan, they have a judge on their side who has made her biases against Trump as clear as any judge’s have been against a defendant since Salem in the 1690s.
As Morrissey said in his statement, Chutkan’s order helps only the Biden administration
“The judge’s approach for the gag order ignores the fact that the government’s case is political to the core — it’s obvious the other side is stopping at nothing to silence Biden’s political opponent,” Morrisey said.
So what Trump and his supporters have is the ability to appeal to the judiciary.
There’s no guarantee of how the appeals court will rule. And there’s no guarantee that the attorney generals’ friend of the court brief will sway the decision.
But there’s no denying that the document helps the Trump cause. Democrats and their pet prosecutors would like nothing better than to keep Trump’s D.C. trial an inside-the-Beltway circus as much as possible.
There, they have a jury being drawn from voting rolls in a jurisdiction that went for Biden in 2020 by 92 percent. It might as well be coming from an audience of “The View.”
The attorneys general brief, however, makes it clear that Trump’s trial is a national issue — and the freedoms that are at stake aren’t just one man’s but the country as a whole.
And every American needs to know it.
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