The New York criminal trial of Donald Trump resumed Thursday with a familiar scenario — prosecutors sparring with the former president’s defense lawyers about whether he violated a gag order prohibiting him from attacking witnesses and jurors in the case.
On Tuesday, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ruled that Trump violated the gag order nine times, held him in contempt of court and fined him $9,000, a relative pittance for a billionaire like Trump, as Merchan acknowledged in his order.
The judge, after a 40-minute hearing, did not issue an immediate ruling on four more statements Trump has made. Among them were on-camera comments from last week in which Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential contender, disparaged the 12 jurors hearing the case as Democrats deciding his fate.
Prosecutor Christopher Conroy told Merchan, “The defendant thinks the rules should be different for him.”
Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche suggested that Trump has to respond to reporters’ questions about the trial in a hallway outside the courtroom, but Merchan rejected Blanche’s contention.
“It was your client who went down to that holding area and stood in front of the press and started to speak,” Merchan said. “It wasn’t the press that went to him. He went to the press. He didn’t need to go in that direction.”
Blanche then agreed that no one was forcing Trump to talk to reporters, drawing laughter in an overflow room where spectators are watching the trial on closed circuit television.
In addition, Trump attacked a key prospective witness in the case, Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and political fixer who has turned against him. Cohen, despite at one point agreeing to forego more attacks on Trump, has not stopped.
As a result, Merchan has suggested he might loosen his restriction on Trump assailing Cohen in return.
The judge also did not seem particularly concerned that Trump made a favorable comment outside the courtroom about former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who testified last week about how he agreed, at Trump’s behest, to help him any way he could to win the White House in the 2016 election.
As it stands now, any comments about witnesses are prohibited under the gag order.
In the Tuesday order, Merchan sternly warned Trump that if he continued to ignore his mid-trial rulings, he could be jailed.
“Defendant is hereby warned that the Court will not tolerate continued violations of its lawful orders and that if necessary and appropriate under the circumstances, it will impose an incarceratory punishment,” Merchan said in an eight-page ruling.
Pecker said his grocery store tabloid paid $150,000 for the rights to a claim by Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, that she had a months-long affair with Trump, but that it was a story Pecker had no intention of publishing in the Enquirer.
After Merchan’s contempt of court ruling Tuesday, Trump on his campaign website issued an appeal for campaign donations, saying the “Democrat judge just ruled against me.”
The gag order does not prohibit the 45th U.S. president from attacking Merchan.
Trump, in the first-ever trial of a former U.S. president, is accused of falsifying his business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to porn film star Stormy Daniels to hide her claim of a one-night tryst with Trump in 2006. Prosecutors say the payment was to keep the information from voters just ahead of the 2016 election.
Trump has denied the two women’s claims of affairs with him and all 34 charges in the New York case.
Even as Merchan ruled against Trump in the first contempt case, the judge warned Cohen and Daniels about their ongoing taunting public social media posts against Trump.
When testimony resumed on the 10th day of what could be a six-week trial, prosecutors again questioned Daniels’ lawyer, Keith Davidson, who negotiated her hush money payment.
Davidson previously had testified about his contentious dealings with Cohen in negotiating the payments with Daniels and McDougal and said the Trump aide appeared at one point to be backing out of completing the deal on Daniels, just before the election.
Ultimately, Cohen made the payment out of his personal home equity line of credit and was reimbursed by Trump in 2017 after he became president.
The repayments to Cohen are at the center of the criminal charges against the 77-year-old former president, who said the payments to Cohen were for legal work and not the hush money that went to Daniels.
Trump’s defense lawyers are contending that Cohen, in turning against Trump, is out for revenge against his former boss and that he alone paid Daniels, and that Trump was not involved. Cohen was convicted of a campaign finance violation linked to the hush money payment to Daniels and other offenses. He served 13½ months in a federal prison and another year and a half in home confinement.
Knowing how Trump’s lawyers will attack Cohen when he testifies, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass has elicited numerous accounts from Davidson about how volatile Cohen could be and possible motives for him seeking revenge against Trump.
In one piece of testimony, Davidson said he received a phone call from Cohen in December 2016 after Trump was president.
According to Davidson, Cohen said he was despondent, quoting him as saying, “I can’t believe I’m not going to Washington,” an acknowledgment that Trump had not asked him to join his new administration.
On cross-examination by Trump defense lawyer Emil Bove, Davidson said about Cohen, “I thought he was going to kill himself.” Bove suggested that Cohen wanted to be named to a high-ranking position, even as high as U.S. attorney general.
