Trump Lawyers: RTs Aren't Endorsements, So, No Contempt, Your Honor!
Try that in a small brief.
They haven’t even picked a jury yet for his New York criminal case, and Donald Trump is doing his damnedest to get himself held in contempt.
His in-court antics — falling asleep, playing on his phone, refusing to stand and face the potential jurors, being fed a constant stream of happy news by a young woman toting a wireless printer — might do it for a normal defendant. But the former president’s extrajudicial statements have clearly violated the gag order imposed by the court, forcing his lawyers to make ever more ridiculous claims to defend him, even before next week’s contempt hearing.
The gag order imposed by Justice Juan Merchan on March 26 barred the defendant from “making or directing others to make public statements” regarding witnesses, line prosecutors, court staff, and jurors, along with family members of the above parties. After Trump pivoted to attacking Justice Merchan’s daughter, it was later expanded to include family members of the judge and District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
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Since then, Trump has honored the edict more in the breach than in the observance. He called Michael Cohen a “disgraced attorney and felon” who has been “prosecuted for LYING,” and quoted Michael Avenatti — also a disgraced attorney and felon! — calling Cohen and Stormy Daniels sleazebags. In the main, however, his strategy has been to link to or screenshot other people saying things which he himself would be barred from saying under the gag order.
Apparently emboldened by the court’s lackadaisical response to his prior violations, Trump went even further on Wednesday, simply slapping quotation marks around an attack on the jury and attributing it to Jesse Watters, the simpering douchebag who took over Tucker Carlson’s slot after proving to Fox’s bosses that he was equally troll-y, but insufficiently influential to spark a major lawsuit.
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There is no universe in which this isn’t a direct violation of the prohibition on public statements about prospective jurors. And, as if to highlight the dangers from Trump’s rhetoric, the morning started with one of the jurors seated yesterday requesting to be excused after being immediately doxxed thanks to the media’s detailed reporting of her biographical details. (Since then the media has decided that it’s not strictly necessary to report the eye color, maiden name, and date of last menstrual period for each individual juror.)
The prosecutors argued that Trump had violated the gag order seven times since they’d moved for a hearing on the matter.
“It’s ridiculous and it has to stop,” Assistant District Attorney Chris Conroy complained, adding that the reference to jurors was “the most disturbing post, especially in light of this morning.”
Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove, who spent a decade in the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York and now pretends to have fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, insisted that the order was somehow ambiguous when it came to Trump reposting content generated by others.
“President Trump’s responses are political in nature. They’re intended to defend against what Mr. Cohen is saying… the gag order didn’t prohibit responding to political attacks,” Bove said, according to the Daily Beast. “One other thing. Only recently … has DA taken the position that reposting statements by others violates the gag order.”
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Bove even went so far as to credit his client with “bring[ing] to light some of the ambiguities in the order.”
You know … for the sake of fleshing out the issues!
This was marginally less stupid than Tuesday when Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, invented a “responding to salacious, repeated vehement attacks by these witnesses” exception to the order. But it will be interesting to see these guys put that in writing when they brief the contempt issue Friday.
Maybe they can get their client to help with the drafting. He seems super familiar with New York criminal procedure.
People v. Trump [Case Documents via Just Security]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
