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NEW YORK (news agencies) — A New York judge Tuesday issued a gag order barring Donald Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial, citing the former president’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases.
Judge Juan M. Merchan’s decision, echoing a gag order in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case, came a day after he rejected the defense’s push to delay the Manhattan trial until summer and ordered it to begin April 15. If the date holds, it will be the first criminal trial of a former president.
“Given that the eve of trial is upon us, it is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” Merchan wrote in a four-page decision granting the prosecution’s request for what it deemed a “narrowly tailored” gag order.
The judge said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s statements have induced fear and necessitated added security measures to protect his targets and investigate threats.
Trump’s lawyers fought a gag order, warning it would amount to unconstitutional and unlawful prior restraint on his free speech rights. Merchan, who had long resisted imposing a gag order, said his obligation to ensuring the integrity of the trial outweighed First Amendment concerns.
“President Trump’s political opponents have, and will continue to, attack him based on this case,” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles said in a recent court filing. “The voters have the right to listen to President Trump’s unfettered responses to those attacks — not just one side of that debate.”
The gag order bars Trump from either making or directing other people to make public statements on his behalf about potential witnesses and jurors in the hush-money trial. It also prohibits any statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families.
It does not bar comments about Merchan, whom Trump has referred to after his arraignment last year as “a Trump-hating judge” with a family full of “Trump haters,” or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat. But it puts Trump on notice that attacks on key figures in the case, like his former lawyer-turned-nemesis Michael Cohen or porn star Stormy Daniels, won’t be tolerated.
