Judge Threatens Jail if Trump Violates Gag Order Again

Keeping up with Donald Trump’s court schedule is a dizzying task, since he faces two federal trials, a criminal trial in Georgia, and two separate civil and criminal trials in New York. (Oh, and he’s running for president.) To make it easier to follow along, each Monday we’ll be looking back at all the Trump trial–related developments you might have missed the previous week.

On Monday, a New York Supreme Court justice found that Trump has once again violated his gag order and warned he could be jailed if this keeps up. Last week, the hush money trial attracted some big names in Trump’s orbit who listened in on the historic proceedings. Meanwhile, the defense is pursuing a new delay tactic in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

Kicking the week off strong, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ruled Monday morning that Trump had violated his gag order for the 10^th time since the hush money trial began three weeks ago. He also threatened to hold Trump in jail if he keeps the violations going.

Merchan’s gag order prevents Trump from publicly speaking about jurors, witnesses, or family members of prosecutors and the judge himself in a way that could reasonably lead to threats. Yet, last week, as he walked out of a separate court hearing for another set of gag order violations, Trump gave a TV interview in which he insulted his former lawyer Michael Cohen, a critical witness in the ongoing hush money trial. “Michael Cohen is a convicted liar, and he’s got no credibility whatsoever,” he ranted.

That interview, along with other comments Trump made about Cohen to reporters, led prosecutors to ask for further contempt charges against the former president. Merchan ultimately ruled that calling Cohen a “convicted liar” was protected political speech but fined Trump an additional $1,000 on Monday after the previous $9,000 for comments he made “targeting the jury as 95 percent Democrats.”

In court Monday, Merchan warned Trump directly, in the harshest terms yet, that continued violations could result in much more severe punishment. “The magnitude of a such a decision is not lost on me, but at the end of the day I have a job to do, and part of that job is to protect the dignity of the judicial system,” Merchan said. “So, much as I do not want to impose a sanction [of jail] and I have done everything I can to avoid doing so, … I will if necessary.”

Trump’s behavior here isn’t all that surprising—he also violated the gag order in his civil fraud case multiple times, earning $15,000 in fines. A former White House lawyer for the Trump administration told Politico that this is a targeted strategy to delegitimize the legal battles Trump faces.

When FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago two years ago, they seized 33 boxes containing 11,000 documents. And as prosecutors sifted through all that paper for special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation, some of those documents got shuffled out of their original order.

Smith’s team said as much in a court filing last week, after a lawyer for Walt Nauta—a co-defendant in the classified documents indictment—asked for a delay in the case because he could not find the documents prosecutors were referring to. That’s because when FBI agents came across any classified documents during their raid at Mar-a-Lago, they replaced them with a “classified cover sheet.” However, they found so many classified documents that they quickly ran out of cover sheets and instead used blank sheets of paper on which they hand-wrote each document’s classification level.

Most of the handwritten cover sheets were replaced, but some were left in the seized boxes, complicating efforts to link placeholders with their corresponding classified document. However, Smith’s team also digitally scanned each classified document that it seized and created an FBI index code linking each scanned document to the box from which it had been retrieved. “Nauta, therefore, has had access to this information, as well as the physical boxes, for nearly ten months,” wrote Smith.

Although the special counsel argued that the shuffling of seized classified documents did not merit a delay in Nauta’s case, Trump believes otherwise. In a post to his Truth Social account, Trump called Smith’s court filing an admittance of “blatant Evidence Tampering by mishandling the very Boxes they used as a pretext to bring this Fake Case.” And, unsurprisingly, Trump asserted that this mishap mandates “that this whole Witch Hunt be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY.”

Hicks, the former White House communications director for the Trump administration, took the witness stand last week. When she discussed her time working for the former president, she became visibly overwhelmed.

Hicks’ testimony added to the chorus of people close to Trump who have confirmed that in the run-up to the 2016 election, Cohen paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair. Her testimony also shed light on how Cohen is viewed within the former president’s inner circle. “I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person,” Hicks testified. He’s “the kind of person who seeks credit.”

When the defense started to cross-examine Hicks, she began to cry, prompting the court to take a 10-minute break. It’s not clear what precisely brought on the tears, as Slate’s Jeremy Stahl noted in a dispatch of the day’s court proceedings. When she resumed her testimony, she confirmed that she had had a conversation with Trump the day after the New York Times reported that Cohen confessed to making a hush money payment to Daniels. “President Trump was saying that he had spoken to Michael and that Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation and that Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that’s what he was doing.”

Keith Davidson, a former attorney of Daniels’ who represented her in the early days of the hush money scandal, also testified for the defense last week. And in the courtroom, some familiar faces showed up to the proceedings, including Trump’s adult son Eric, Trump nemesis George Conway, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (Eric returned to the courtroom Monday.)