Trump asks judge to free him from gag order now that hush money trial is over
NEW YORK — Days after being found guilty in his Manhattan hush money case, Donald Trump on Tuesday asked a judge to lift the gag order preventing him from publicly attacking trial participants like jurors, witnesses and prosecutors, as well as the families of all involved.
In a letter to state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, Trump’s defense team said his order barring extrajudicial statements by Trump, which was implemented before the trial as a security measure, should be lifted.
The request cited comments made about Trump’s historic conviction by witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, Democrats outside the courthouse during closing arguments and by President Biden last Friday, the day after Trump was found guilty.
Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove also referenced the upcoming presidential debate on June 27 as a reason he should be able to speak his mind without restraint about the case he says was a sham.
“Now that the trial is concluded, the concerns articulated by the government and the Court do not justify continued restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump who remains the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election and the American people,” Blanche and Bove wrote.
Trump was fined thousands of dollars during the trial for repeatedly violating Merchan’s order, which he expanded to include relatives after Trump took aim at the jurist’s daughter online, boosting the unfounded conspiracy theory that she was trashing him on the web and profiting from Trump’s prosecution in her role as a Democrat consultant. Merchan previously said the gag order would remain in effect through the trial without specifying an expiration date.
The judge said in early April that Trump’s “pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”
“The threat is very real,” the judge wrote. “The average observer must now, after hearing defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well.”
After at least 10 breaches of the gag order by April 30, the judge said he’d consider jailing Trump for further violations.
Trump appeared to skirt close to further violations at a press conference the morning after his conviction in remarks alluding to Cohen, Daniels and Merchan’s daughter. Blanche told the Daily News afterward that he wasn’t worried.
In a Tuesday text to The News, Cohen said, “Donald’s vitriolic rhetoric will never be curtailed as he has zero respect for the rule of law,” and referenced Trump’s multiple gag order violations.
Following a seven-week trial, jurors took less than 12 hours to find Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The docs hid his reimbursement to Cohen for paying off Daniels to stay silent about her claims of a seedy sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, the jury determined, as part of a conspiracy to defraud the voting public in 2016.
The Thursday verdict, which Trump said he would appeal, marked the first criminal conviction of a U.S. president in the nation’s history. Merchan ruled before the trial that the jurors’ names would be anonymous to the public out of concern for their safety.
Trump is scheduled to return to court for his sentencing on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention, where he’s expected to be named the GOP nominee. The charges each carry up to four years in prison, with the maximum imposable sentence being 20 years. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the scheme in 2018, received a three-year term of incarceration.
The targets of Trump’s public attacks connected to his New York cases have been hit with a torrent of abuse since he was first indicted. Bomb squads have been called to the lower Manhattan courthouses multiple times, as well as officials’ homes, and judges and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg have been targeted with bogus white powder scares and death threats.
Trump’s lawyers did not respond to a request seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Bragg declined to comment.
_____
