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Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird is among 24 state attorneys general asking a Florida judge let former President Trump speak publicly about the search of his Mar-A-Lago resort. A special prosecutor has asked the judge overseeing the classified documents case against Trump to issue a gag order.
“President Trump has First Amendment rights just like anybody else,” Bird told reporters in Des Moines, “and a gag order that would not allow him comment on law enforcement and their raid of his home at Mar-A-Lago I believe violates his First Amendment rights.”
Bird was part of the team that drafted a legal brief that argues the gag order would “muzzle…political speech.”
“As a county attorney, I never requested a gag order for any defendant. It’s very unusual to have that sort of far reaching gag order that implicates First Amendment rights of a criminal defendant,” said Birder who served as Fremont County Attorney and then as Guthrie County Attorney before being elected as the state’s attorney general in 2022.
This is the second time Bird has been one of the leading attorneys general in drafting a brief to oppose a gag order on Trump. The first was related to federal charges that accuse Trump of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In this latest brief, Bird and the other attorneys general says a gag order in the classified documents case “would deny Americans the right to hear” what Trump has to say “about the most heated political issue of the day.”
The special prosecutor has said Trump’s comments on the case have “endangered law officers involved in the investigation” and “threatened the integrity of the proceedings.”
