The New York judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal trial has delayed a decision on whether he should be fined $10,000 for attacking an expected trial witness in direct violation of a gag order designed to protect trial participants from being targeted for Trump’s abuse.
Judge Juan Merchan reserved his ruling. But he seemed deeply unconvinced by arguments from Trump’s chief lawyer, Todd Branch, that a series of social media posts were merely a response to Trump’s political attacks and were therefore permissible.
“Mr. Branch, you have lost all credibility, I must tell you now,” the judge said at one point. “You are losing all trust of the court. Is there anything else you would like to argue?
Merchant’s admonishment was a significant rebuke, especially in the midst of a criminal trial, and underscored Branch’s difficulty in explaining 10 posts alleged by prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to have violated the gag order.
Although prosecutors told the judge they are not seeking jail time for Trump for allegedly violating the gag order, they are asking that he be held in contempt of court and fined up to $1,000 for each of the 10 offending posts.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office also told the judge it plans to file further motions alleging that Trump violated the gag order again in a hallway outside the courthouse when he told news cameras that his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen was a serial perjurer. By.
Trump has been protesting for weeks the 34-count indictment accusing him of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments he made to porn star Stormy Daniels to protect his 2016 presidential campaign The campaign was shielded from negative press coverage, a violation of campaign finance laws.
The dissatisfaction focused particularly on Cohen, who facilitated hush-money payments to Daniels and to Daniels himself. Both men are expected to testify against Trump at the trial and are protected by gag orders.
Branch, Trump’s lawyer, claimed during Tuesday’s hearing that most of the posts were in response to personal or political attacks on Trump, while others retweeted links to New York Post articles or other Views expressed by people, including famed Fox News host Jesse Waters.
But the judge seemed deeply skeptical of those arguments, questioning why Trump waited until a challenge to the gag order was rejected by a New York appeals court to “respond” to Cohen’s taunts in a post instead of responding immediately.
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The judge also invited Branch to demonstrate instances where retweets were found to be any different than posts written by the defendants and to provide specific political attacks against Trump. “Give me one. Please tell me about a recent attack he was dealing with,” Moqian said.
Branch said a post mentioning Cohen was definitely political in nature because it referenced Trump granting a presidential pardon. Merchant was unmoved, the judge said: Blanche had to do better than just point to a word.
The outcome of the contempt hearing was particularly bad for Trump, with the judge interrupting Branch to clarify that it was a mistake to characterize a post as simply retweeting a quote from Waters on television. Merchan said Trump “manipulated” the sentence by adding in his own words and then putting quotation marks around it.
Earlier this month, Merchin expanded the scope of the gag order against Trump after accusing him of making “threatening, inflammatory, defamatory” remarks about the case ahead of his trial in New York Supreme Court.
Under the order, Trump cannot or directs others to make public statements about the role of trial witnesses in the investigation and trial, prosecutors other than Bragg himself, and court staff or district attorney staff.
