Local prosecutors in Donald Trump’s “hush money” criminal case in New York have asked the state judge overseeing the impending trial, scheduled to begin April 15, to clarify the terms of a gag order placed on Trump last week, after the former president repeatedly attacked the judge’s daughter.
Judge Juan Merchan instituted the gag order on Tuesday, citing Trump’s “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” rhetoric and barring him from making interfering statements about witnesses, lawyers, and “the family members” of any “counsel or staff member” in the case. The order did carve out an exception for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is leading the prosecution. It did not explicitly mention Merchan or his family as covered by the terms of the order.
A day later, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, was using a photo of Trump behind bars as her social media profile, claiming that the photo “makes it completely impossible for me to get a fair trial.” Merchan is a Democratic political consultant, and Trump wrote that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, and other Radical Liberals.”
Yet the New York State Court system quickly refuted Trump’s claim. A spokesperson said Wednesday that the account in question “no longer belongs” to Merchan’s daughter, and that someone else had taken it over. (As of Saturday, it is still unclear who owns the account.) The profile photo was a “manipulation of an account [Merchan] long ago abandoned,” the spokesperson added.
In a letter filed on Thursday and made public on Friday, Bragg’s office asked Merchan to clarify the order and to direct Trump to “immediately desist from attacks on family members.”
“The People believe that the March 26 Order is properly read to protect family members of the Court,” wrote Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass. “But to avoid any doubt, this Court should now clarify or confirm that the Order protects family members of the Court, the District Attorney, and all other individuals mentioned in the Order.” Steinglass added that Trump should face “sanctions under judiciary law” if he continues to “disregard” court orders.
Lawyers for Trump shot back on Friday in a letter to Merchan. “The Court cannot ‘direct’ President Trump to do something that the gag order does not require,” Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles wrote. “To ‘clarify or confirm’ the meaning of the gag order in the way the People suggest would be to expand it.”
In the letter to Merchant, Steinglass claimed that “multiple potential witnesses” have come forward to express concerns “about their own safety and that of their family members” should they testify against Trump next month.
The former president’s New York trial is expected to last approximately two months, and could be the only one of his four criminal trials to wrap up before the November election. The Republican presumptive nominee is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payment during the 2016 presidential race to Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had a sexual Relationship with Trump years earlier.