Prosecutors ask judge to punish 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 president that he could be jailed if he continues 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 TV 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 in social media and on his campaign website. That led Justice Juan Merchan to impose a gag order on the former president, which was later tightened after Trump painted the judge and his family as Democratic operatives.

One post on his Truth Social social media network — in which Trump 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.

In opening arguments on Monday, Manhattan prosecutors said that the alleged pay-offs were an attempt to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favour, while the 77-year-old’s defence team said he had acted entirely lawfully in attempting to suppress an embarrassing and false accusation.

The court briefly heard on Monday from the prosecution’s first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who was allegedly involved in the “catch and kill” scheme by purchasing exclusive rights to anti-Trump stories — and then preventing them from being published. Pecker is expected to continue testifying later on Tuesday.