Prosecutor asks judge to sanction Donald Trump for gag order violation in hush money case: Live updates

Editor’s note: This is developing news. Check back for updates.

Prosecutors on Monday asked a New York judge to sanction Donald Trump for violating a gag order in multiple social media posts commenting on likely witnesses at the former president’s criminal hush money trial.

“He is a criminal defendant, and like all criminal defendants he is subject to court supervision,” assistant District Attorney Chris Conroy told Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan as Trump looked on in the courtroom.

Conroy pointed to three recent posts that reference Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose receipt of a $130,000 hush money payment from Cohen is at the center of the criminal case.

The prosecutor asked Merchan to impose a $1,000 sanction for each of the three posts and order Trump to take them down.

The prosecutors also want Merchan to warn Trump that another violation could result in jail time.

The judge said he would hold a hearing on the request on April 24.

The request came on what will be the first day of jury selection for the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president.

The first group of potential jurors to enter the jury box stared frequently at Trump while Merchan explained the case to them. Trump occasionally glanced back at them.

Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, must be in court throughout the trial including during the jury selection process. The trial is expected to take six weeks or more.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Trump told reporters before going into the courtroom Monday morning.

“This is political persecution,” he said. “It’s an assault on America and that’s why I’m very proud to be here.”

Trump’s lawyers last week repeatedly sought to delay Monday’s start date with last-ditch efforts in an appeals court, but those efforts all failed.

In all, defense attorneys tried about a dozen times to dismiss or delay the trial, but only succeeded in pushing it back by a few weeks.

Merchan began the proceedings Monday by rejecting Trump’s request that the judge step off the case due to an alleged conflict as a result of Merchan’s daughter’s work for a digital fundraising and advertising firm whose clients have included Vice President Kamala Harris.

The gag order on Trump, imposed last month, was expanded April 1 after the former president repeatedly targeted the judge’s daughter on social media.

Trump is charged with nearly three dozen counts of falsifying business records. He will be required to be in the courtroom every day for the trial, which is expected to last about six weeks or more.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has accused Trump of filing business records that hid the true purpose of the payment Cohen made to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.

Cohen, who is expected to testify against Trump, said he paid Daniels in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual tryst with the then-GOP nominee years earlier. Trump has denied having sex with Daniels.

It could take a week or more to finish selecting jurors before testimony begins. Trump said several days ago that he would be willing to testify.

Trump has used social media to blast the criminal case, and the people involved in it, and did so again early Monday morning.

“The Radical Left Democrats are already cheating on the 2024 Presidential Election by bringing, or helping to bring, all of these bogus lawsuits against me, thereby forcing me to sit in courthouses, and spend money that could be used for campaigning, instead of being out in the field knocking Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the History of the United States,” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post. “Election Interference!”

The trial could significantly hurt Trump’s ability to campaign in person for the White House. Trump is set to face President Joe Biden in November in a rematch of their 2020 contest.

Trump is also charged in three other criminal cases.

Two of them — one in federal court in Washington, D.C., the other in Georgia state court — are related to his attempt to reverse his 2020 loss to Biden, which included unsuccessfully pressuring state election officials and legislators to effectively nullify Biden’s victory in several swing states.

The other criminal case, in federal court in Florida, is for charges related to his retention of classified government records after he left the White House, and his alleged efforts to hide the records from government officials when they sought their return.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in all of his criminal cases.

Although Bragg’s prosecution of Trump was long considered the least serious of the cases, the New York trial may ultimately prove to be the most consequential for Trump.

As a result of a sustained effort by Trump’s team to either dismiss his indictments or delay his trials, the hush money case could be the only one that goes to trial in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.