If you haven’t been keeping up with the DOJ clown show going on in Florida surrounding the prosecution of two men in the AutoKeyCard auto sear case, read this and this. Then go read Ammoland’s post, too.
Long story short — a shockingly thin-skinned Assistant US Attorney who was one of two prosecutors on the case didn’t like that John Crump, who writes for Ammoland and also has his own podcast and YouTube channel, was reporting on the trial of the two men who ran the AutoKeyCard operation. It seems that commenters were also saying mean things about her. On the internet. Imagine that.
In her latest hissy fit about the reporting, she filed a motion with the court asking the judge to order Crump to destroy a pre-sentencing investigative report that one of the defendants had given him. The judge held a hearing on the gag order request earlier this afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida.
It seems AUSA Taylor’s motion for prior restraint…wasn’t well-received by the trial judge. At all.
In fact, as we just heard from one of the involved parties, the judge’s displeasure (probably combined with the fact that Crump was well-represented by very able counsel) was such that Taylor apparently thought better of her clearly unconstitutional, half-baked motion and withdrew it.
So all’s well that ends well. And an embarrassingly sensitive DOJ prosecutor — who certainly should have known better — has apparently learned a lesson. Or so we hope.
UPDATE: This is what you call a judicial smackdown.
