NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump said he remains muzzled by a silence order following his conviction in his hush-money criminal trial. His lawyer said he thinks the silence order would expire with the verdict and that he might ask the court for clarity.
“I’m under a gag order, a dirty gag order,” the former president said Friday while speaking to reporters at Trump Tower. Referring to star prosecutor Michael Cohen, Trump said: “I’m not allowed to use his name because of the gag order.”
But despite saying he is still subject to the order banning comments about witnesses and others related to his case, Trump again lashed out at his former lawyer who had become an enemy in the courtroom.
Without mentioning Cohen by name, Trump called him “a sleazebag,” using the same language that the Manhattan district attorney identified as a possible violation before the trial.
“Everyone knows that. It took me a while to figure it out,” Trump added during a 33-minute speech in which he railed against the guilty verdict and repeated baseless claims that his rival, President Joe Biden, had influenced the prosecution .
Trump was convicted Thursday of 34 counts of falsifying corporate records stemming from what prosecutors say was an attempt to cover up a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. She claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump ten years earlier, which he denies. He will be sentenced on July 11.
Trump lawyer Todd Blanche said Friday that he assumed the gag order would be lifted if the trial ended with a verdict because that’s how prosecutors framed their request when they asked for the restrictions in February.
But, Blanche said, he thinks Trump is still trying to be cautious because it’s not clear to him whether that actually happened. During the trial, Judge Juan M. Merchan held Trump in contempt of court, fining him $10,000 for violating the gag order and threatening to put him in jail if he did it again.
“I don’t want President Trump to violate the gag order,” Blanche said. “I don’t think it applies anymore. I feel like the process is over and it shouldn’t be.”
“It’s a bit of a theater of the absurd at the moment, isn’t it? Michael Cohen is no longer a witness in this trial,” Blanche added. “The process is over. The same applies to all other witnesses. So we’ll see. I don’t mean that in any way as disrespectful to the judge and the process. I just want to be careful and understand when it no longer applies.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the state court system said: “The order is part of the court record that has been made public and is self-explanatory.” The statement did not specify what part of the order it affected, although Merchan noted in issuing the order that prosecutors had requested the restrictions “for the duration of the trial.”
A message seeking comment was left for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Merchan imposed the silence order on March 26, a few weeks before the start of the trial, after prosecutors raised concerns about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s tendency to attack people involved in his cases. It banned him from publicly commenting on witnesses, jurors and others involved in his hush-money case.
Merchan later expanded it to ban comments about his own family after Trump posted on social media attacking the judge’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant, and making false claims about her.
Trump’s use of the term “sleazebag” to describe Cohen just before the trial confused prosecutors but was not considered a violation of the gag order by the judge. Merchan declined to chastise Trump for an April 10 social media post that referred to Cohen and Daniels, another key prosecution witness, with that insult.
The judge said at the time that Trump’s claim that he was responding to Cohen’s previous posts critical of him “is sufficient to cause him to consider whether prosecutors met their burden in showing that the post was out of bounds used to be.
A state appeals court this month rejected Trump’s request to lift the trial silence order in whole or in part, ruling that Merchan had properly determined that Trump’s public statements “posed a significant threat to the integrity of the testimony of witnesses and potential witnesses.”
The state’s mid-level appeals court ruled that “Merchan” properly balanced Trump’s free speech rights against Trump’s “historic commitment to ensuring due process in criminal cases, and the right of individuals who related or tangentially connected to the criminal proceedings in order to be free. against threats, intimidation, intimidation and harm.”
__
Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
