Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
Donald Trump has been fined $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order in his hush money trial for his ongoing public attacks against witnesses on his Truth Social.
Moments before a second week of witness testimony began on Tuesday, the judge overseeing the case issued a brief order from the bench finding him in contempt of court and ordering $1,000 fines for nine offending posts.
In his written order, New York Justice Juan Merchan warned that Mr Trump could face an “incarceratory punishment” if he continues his “willful violations” of the court’s order, if “necessary and appropriate under the circumstances.”
He also suggested that Mr Trump could face severe sanctions, if the penalties aren’t enough to stop him.
“While $1,000 may suffice in most instances to protect the dignity of the judicial system to compel respect for its mandates and to punish the offender for disobeying a court order, it unfortunately will not achieve the desired result in those instances where the contemnor can easily afford such a fine,” Judge Merchan wrote.
“In those circumstances, it would be preferable if the court could impose a fine more commensurate with the wealth of the contemnor,” he added. “In some cases that might be a $2,500 fine, in other cases it might be a fine of $150,000. Because this Court is not cloaked with such discretion, it must therefore consider whether in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.”
Mr Trump must delete the posts by Tuesday afernoon and pay the fine by Friday.
Manhattan prosecutors accused Mr Trump of breaching a trial gag order at least 10 different posts on his Truth Social platform and on his campaign website, including posts targeting Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.
Mr Trump’s former attorney and the adult film star – both central to the scheme at the heart of the case – are high-profile witnesses expected to testify about Mr Trump’s alleged plot to falsify business records to hide payments to Ms Daniels, what prosecutors have described as a months-long scheme to bury politically compromising stories of his alleged affairs to boost his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election.
Last week, prosecutors alleged four more violations from within the first days of witness testimony alone, including statements Mr Trump gave just outside the courtroom’s doors.
Mr Trump’s ongoing statements that “specifically target individuals and the proceeding which this court’s order protects is a deliberate flouting of this court’s directives that warrants sanctions,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Christopher Conroy wrote.
Judge Merchan will hold another hearing on the four new alleged violations on 2 May.
On 23 April, defence attorney Todd Blanche argued that Mr Trump’s posts were responding to “political” attacks but failed to offer up any examples of what, exactly, Mr Trump was responding to.
Judge Merchan was wholly unconvinced.
“You presented nothing,” he told Mr Trump’s attorney. “You’re losing all credibility, I’ll tell you that right now.”
Lawyers with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office have now argued that Mr Trump violated a nearly month-old gag order in the case at least 14 times since Judge Merchan issued the initial order last month.
On the trial’s second day, while jury selection was underway, the judge separately warned Mr Trump against intimidating jurors in his courtroom.
A protective order bars Mr Trump from making public statements about witnesses, jurors and others connected to the case. Judge Merchan expanded the order to include public statements about the families of the judge and Mr Bragg’s office.
Prosecutors asked the judge to hold Mr Trump in contempt, fine him $1,000 for each breach, and order him to remove the offending posts with a warning that he could face jailtime.
Mr Trump has a habit of saying “whatever he wants to say to get the results he wants,” Assistant District Attorney Christopher Conroy told the judge last week.
In this case, Mr Trump is “knowingly and willfully breaching the crystal clear, unequivocal lines drawn up by the court,” he said.
The trial’s first week of witness testimony concluded on Friday with remarkable testimony tying a former president to an alleged plot to corruptly influence an American election, against a backdrop of menace from the candidate-turned-defendant and his alleged threats to jurors and the witnesses assembled against him.
Mr Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged scheme to buy the silence of adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose story of her alleged affair with Mr Trump threatened to derail his chances of winning the 2016 election, according to prosecutors.
The gag order in his criminal trial follows gag orders in his civil fraud case and in his federal election interference case, where prosecutors warned that his social media bully pulpit could be used to fuel attacks.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which is overseeing Mr Trump’s federal criminal cases, described that dynamic in court documents last year as “part of a pattern, stretching back years, in which people publicly targeted” by Mr Trump are “subject to harassment, threats, and intimidation”.
The former president “seeks to use this well-known dynamic to his advantage,” the filing added, and “it has continued unabated as this case and other unrelated cases involving the defendant have progressed”.
Gag orders in the fraud case in New York blocked Mr Trump, his attorneys and all other parties in the case from disparaging court staff.
He was fined $15,000 for violating that order. His attorney Alina Habba ultimately cut the check to the court.
A state appeals court allowed his fraud trial gag orders to stand after court filings outlined the wave of credible death threats and abusive messages that followed Mr Trump’s attacks against court employees and others.
An official with the New York court system’s Department of Public Safety wrote in an affidavit last year that “the implementation of the limited gag orders” in the fraud case “resulted in a decrease in the number of threats, harassment, and disparaging messages that the judge and his staff received”.
The threats against New York Justice Arthur Engoron and his clerk Allison Greenfield were “serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative,” he wrote.
