Legal experts say Trump DOJ tweets make life harder for prosecutors

MANHATTAN (CN) — Late Wednesday night, federal prosecutors tried to put out a fire in one of their marquee cases.

A federal judge had scrutinized Department of Justice officials for sharing inflammatory social media posts about Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old Maryland man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Manhattan last year.

In one instance, Chad Gilmartin, deputy director of the department’s public affairs office, shared a clip of President Donald Trump saying in an interview that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.”

“@POTUS is absolutely right,” Gilmartin said in a now-deleted X post, which was then reshared by Associate Deputy Attorney General Brian Nieves.

Finding that those officials seemingly breached court rules on prejudicial pretrial statements, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett demanded answers. In a three-page filing Wednesday night, federal prosecutors argued these individuals are not sufficiently associated with the case since they’re not on the prosecution team.

“Nonetheless … upon becoming aware of the repossessed statements, the department promptly directed that the posts be removed,” they wrote.

The debacle represents one of the many new challenges prosecutors face under the second Trump Justice Department. In addition to questionable indictments of political opponents and terminations of prosecutors deemed nonloyal, Justice Department attorneys must also deal with an unprecedented vocality in their officials that, evidently, has already interfered with one of their flagship cases.

No matter what the judge rules — she has floated fines, contempt of court findings or “relief specific to the prosecution of this matter” — the situation is a good one for Mangione, according to veteran New York City criminal defense attorney Ron Kuby.

“Every moment in court that’s spent discussing governmental misconduct is not spent discussing the guy with a bullet in his back,” Kuby, who has represented several high-profile murder defendants, told Courthouse News.

Mangione’s defense team raised these concerns about the pretrial publicity in their motion to block the death penalty. As well as the posts from Gilmartin and Nieves, they took issue with public statements made by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who famously announced that the Justice Department would be seeking capital punishment against Mangione weeks before securing an indictment.

“I was a capital prosecutor,” Bondi told Fox News 11 days before a federal grand jury indicted Mangione. “I tried death penalty cases throughout my career. If there was ever a death case, this is one.”

Mangione’s lawyers claimed this and other statements from Bondi prove the Justice Department brought the death penalty “unabashedly for political reasons.” They also directed ire toward the White House, questioning how a fair jury can be selected when the executive’s top officials — including the president — continue to imply Mangione’s guilt in public statements.

Federal prosecutors say they’ll respond to those accusations against the White House in a later filing. For now, they’ve tried to assure the Joe Biden-appointed Garnett that no punishment is necessary for the officials’ social media activity.

“The defense offers no evidence that any prospective juror has been exposed to or affected by the reposted content,” they wrote.

Garnett is yet to rule. But it’s all a welcome distraction for any defendant, according to Kuby.

“As a defense lawyer, I want to focus on anything other than what my client is accused of doing,” he said. “And the Trump DOJ makes that easy.”

Meanwhile, government attorneys are now fighting battles on two fronts; not only are they trying a murder case, but they’re also needing to answer for the social media activity of their superiors.

“High-profile cases and trial work in general take up an enormous amount of energy, focus and attention, and any distraction or deviation from that focus is not helpful to the trial team,” said former federal prosecutor Justin Danilewitz, now a white-collar lawyer at Saul Ewing LLP. “This unquestionably would take some amount of attention away from the day-to-day work of prosecuting the case.”

Danilewitz is less than convinced by the government’s argument that Gilmartin and Nieves are not adequately “associated with” the prosecution team. He said that, in his experience, judges have been reluctant to distinguish between the government and the prosecution — let alone accept a distinction between the trial team and the prosecuting agency itself.

“Prosecutors never speak about their cases in public,” said former Brooklyn prosecutor Sarena Townsend, now the owner of Townsend Law in New York City. “Everybody knows that. And the reason you don’t is exactly because of this. You do not want to unfairly prejudice the case or the defendant.”

Some of Mangione’s most fervent supporters hope these pretrial statements will be enough to get the case dismissed altogether or perhaps serve as the basis for tossing the death penalty on their own. That would be an “astonishing” result, according to Kuby.

Still, the statements could kneecap prosecutors’ ability to prove the necessity of capital punishment in the long run. They could also erode the public’s trust in the Justice Department ahead of a trial.

Townsend said the statements about Mangione — from Gilmartin, Nieves, Bondi, even Trump — “really backfired because the general populace, especially in New York, don’t really look at that favorably.”

“Your jury pool is potentially looking at this and just being so mistrustful of law enforcement and of the prosecutors,” she said.

When Garnett does rule, her order could have a far-reaching effect on high-profile prosecutions across the country.

Trump administration officials have not shied away from making public statements about the suspect in right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s killing, for example. And while that case is currently being handled by local prosecutors in Utah, not the Justice Department, the statements nonetheless give the defendant’s lawyers something to latch onto.

“In an otherwise very strong, long prosecution case, where there might be very little for the defense to work with, these are unforced errors by the government,” Danilewitz said. “It’s on the mind of most defense lawyers that there’s an opportunity that could present itself from these missteps by the government.”

“It broadly puts the entire Department of Justice on notice about the perils of public statements, particularly in the most controversial cases,” he added.

For Kuby, he could only describe the situation with one word.

“It’s stupid,” he said. “But from my perspective as a defense lawyer, I find this level of obdurate incompetence to be delightful.”

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