The judge presiding over Donald Trump‘s impending New York criminal trial expanded a partial gag order Monday night following the former president’s online attacks against his daughter.
Judge Juan Merchan said that Trump is barred from attacking his family members and those of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, in addition to the witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and their relatives who he was directed to “refrain” from talking about in a previous gag order issued last week.
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,” Merchan said on Monday. “It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. ‘I’he threat is very real.”
Lawyers for Trump had argued in a filing Monday that his repeated attacks on the daughter were protected political speech, while Manhattan prosecutors urged the judge to crack down on the former president’s escalating rhetoric.
Bragg’s office contended Trump’s bashing of Merchan’s daughter on social media “fundamentally threatens the integrity of these proceedings and is intended to intimidate witnesses and trial participants alike.”
The filing from Trump’s attorneys said the presumptive GOP nominee was not trying to interfere with the trial or “cause harm to anyone,” but suggested he was indeed trying to pressure the judge.
“President Trump’s comments concerning Your Honor’s daughter are, properly understood, a criticism of the Court’s prior decision not to recuse itself,” the filing said. Trump last year had asked Merchan to step down from the case.
“President Trump’s social media posts amplified defense arguments regarding the need for recusal that have been, and will continue to be, the subject of motion practice,” the filing added.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung argued in a statement Monday night that Merchan has a “clear conflict” because of his daughter and “should do the right thing and immediately recuse himself.”
Merchan’s August 2023 decision refusing to step aside noted that he’d sought guidance from the New York state courts system’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics over his daughter’s employment. The committee found the DA’s case “does not involve either the judge’s relative or the relative’s business, whether directly or indirectly. They are not parties or likely witnesses in the matter, and none of the parties or counsel before the judge are clients in the business. We see nothing in the inquiry to suggest that the outcome of the case could have any effect on the judge’s relative, the relative’s business, or any of their interests.”
Merchan’s daughter has worked as president of Authentic Campaigns, a firm Vice President Kamala Harris used for digital fundraising and advertising during her presidential campaign. The firm describes itself as “a digital agency progressives can trust to get the job done right.”
Bragg’s office contended that Trump’s “claim of a constitutional right to levy personal attacks on family members is as disturbing as it is wrong.”
“This issue is not complicated. Family members of trial participants must be strictly off-limits. Defendant’s insistence to the contrary bespeaks a dangerous sense of entitlement to instigate fear and even physical harm to the loved ones of those he sees in the courtroom,” the DA’s filing said.
The back and forth comes after Merchan slapped Trump with a partial gag order last week barring him from trashing witnesses, court staff and their families. The order did not mention the judge or judge’s family.
Trump has since repeatedly taken shots online at Merchan and his daughter.
“Maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’” one of Trump’s posts on Truth Social said. He used her name in a separate post, and another linked to an article with pictures of the daughter.
Another post accused the daughter of using a picture of Trump behind bars as her profile picture on X in an account Al Baker, a spokesperson for the state Office of Court Administration, said was not actually the daughter’s. Baker recently said that someone apparently recreated a version of the daughter’s shuttered account last year, which he called the “manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned.”
The DA said in Monday’s filing that Trump’s attacks were based on “transparent falsehoods” but “the facts are beside the point for this defendant.”
“There is no constitutional right to target the family of this Court, let alone on the blatant falsehoods that have served as the flimsiest pretexts for defendant’s attacks. Defendant knows what he is doing, and everyone else does too,” Bragg’s office contended.
Prosecutors asked the judge to either clarify that the order does extend to his daughter, and said he should expand the order if it does not. They also urged the judge to warn Trump that “any statutory right he may have to access juror names will be forfeited by continued harassing or disruptive conduct.” The DA’s office previously contended that the judge could find Trump in criminal contempt for willful disobedience of a court order, which can include a penalty of up to 30 days imprisonment, if he “continues to disregard such orders.”
Trump’s attorneys said in their filing that Merchan should reject the request to expand the gag order, which they called “an unlawful prior restraint that improperly restricts campaign advocacy by the presumptive Republican nominee and leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election.”
The filing did not acknowledge the apparent social media hoax involving Merchan’s daughter, and instead blasted the judge for Baker’s statement, suggesting it was inappropriate and was tantamount to the judge having “weighed in.”
It also faulted the judge for speaking to The Associated Press for a profile the news wire service published last month, saying he violated the state code of judicial conduct by commenting on the case. “According to reports of the interview, Your Honor indicated that the Court ‘wouldn’t talk about the case,’ but did so anyway,” the filing said, pointing to his remarks that “‘There’s no agenda here . . . . We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.’”
Trump’s attorneys also complained that Merchan participated in the interview while the former president was waiting to hear whether the judge would allow him to file a motion to delay the trial because of pretrial publicity.
That filing was made public on Monday. In it, Trump’s lawyers argued that the “exceptionally prejudicial pretrial publicity, which is substantial, ongoing, and likely to increase” will prevent him from getting a fair trial in the case, which alleges that he falsified business records related to a hush money payment his then-attorney Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump, which he denies.
The filing says both Cohen and Daniels have contributed to the prejudicial publicity by repeatedly criticizing Trump in often graphic terms, despite the DA’s office having asked them not to speak about the case. Trump’s seeking an indefinite adjournment of the trial “until prejudicial press coverage abates.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him in the case.
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