Prosecutors ask judge to punish Donald Trump for violating trial gag order

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Manhattan prosecutors accused Donald Trump of violating a gag order mere steps away from the courtroom in which he is standing trial, as they asked a judge to impose fines and warn the former US president that he would be jailed if he continued to attack witnesses and jurors.

Trump has “violated this order repeatedly and he hasn’t stopped”, assistant district attorney Christopher Conroy told the court on Tuesday. “He did it right here in the hallway outside,” Conroy added, referring to a television clip in which Trump had once again called his former lawyer fixer Michael Cohen a liar. Cohen is expected to be the prosecution’s star witness.

The hearing came ahead of the second day of testimony in what is expected to be a six-week trial in Manhattan. The former president — and presumptive Republican presidential nominee — faces charges of falsifying business records to disguise payments made to buy porn actor Stormy Daniels’ silence in the run-up to the 2016 election, after she threatened to go public with an alleged extramarital affair. 

While Trump has been restrained in front of the judge, he has frequently attacked various figures involved in the case on social media and his campaign website. That led Justice Juan Merchan to impose a gag order on him, which was later tightened after Trump painted the judge and his family as Democratic operatives.

Prosecutors on Tuesday cited 10 instances in which he had since allegedly violated the order on social media and elsewhere.

One post on his Truth Social social media network — in which Trump last week quoted Fox host Jesse Watters claiming that the Manhattan jury deciding the case might contain “undercover Liberal Activists” — was lifted from “a segment specifically discussing the juror profiles in this case”, Conroy added. “[Trump] knows what he is not allowed to do and he does it anyway.”

Manhattan prosecutors asked Merchan to impose a fine of $1,000 per violation, the maximum allowed by New York law, and to warn Trump that he could be sent to jail for 30 days if he continued to flout the gag order.

Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Trump, argued that his client was merely responding to a “barrage of political attacks” by Cohen and Daniels, who have flooded the airwaves with criticism and mockery of the former president.

Merchan appeared to grow increasingly frustrated with the defence’s protestations and warned Blanche he was “losing all credibility with the court”. The judge said he would consider both sides’ arguments before ruling.

Trump took to Truth Social immediately after the hearing, writing that the “HIGHLY CONFLICTED, TO PUT IT MILDLY, JUDGE JUAN MERCHAN, HAS TAKEN AWAY MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH”.

“EVERYBODY IS ALLOWED TO TALK AND LIE ABOUT ME, BUT I AM NOT ALLOWED TO DEFEND MYSELF,” he added.

The court later heard from the prosecution’s first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who was allegedly involved in the “catch and kill” scheme to purchase exclusive rights to anti-Trump stories and then prevent them from being published.

He described how he would “publish positive stories about Mr Trump and . . . publish negative stories about his opponents” and how he had agreed to alert Cohen if he heard “anything about women selling stories”.