Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys asked New York’s highest court to free him from the bounds of the gag order in his hush money trial on Wednesday after the judge in the case penalized him for violating it nearly a dozen times.
Trump’s lawyers filed a notice of appeal with the state’s Court of Appeals seeking for the order to be lifted or changed, according to a notice on the court docket. The effort was first reported by The Associated Press.
Steven Cheung, the spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, told the wire service the filing was meant to challenge an “un-American gag order imposed by conflicted Judge Juan Merchan in the lawless Manhattan DA case.”
Cheung told The Associated Press in a statement, “The threat to throw the 45th President of the United States and the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election in jail for exercising his First Amendment rights is a Third World authoritarian tactic typical of Crooked Joe Biden and his comrades.”
Trump has already been fined $10,000 for 10 violations of the gag order. Merchan warned the former president earlier this month that he would consider sending him to jail if he violates it again.
The former president has routinely attacked the order and lamented that he can’t speak freely about the case, which centers on allegations he falsified business records to hide a hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. In recent days, however, his allies have taken to the airwaves to parrot his frustrations and attack witnesses, including Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen.
A New York state appeals court upheld the order on Tuesday and said it did not violate the former president’s First Amendment rights as he has argued, adding Merchan had “properly determined” that Trump’s ongoing comments about his trials “posed a significant threat to the integrity of the testimony of witnesses and potential witnesses in this case.”
The gag order prohibits Trump from making any public remarks about the jurors, lawyers or potential witnesses in the case. Merchan expanded those parameters shortly before the trial began to block Trump from disparaging the judge’s family members or those of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. That decision came after Trump posted a series of attacks against Merchan’s daughter on social media.
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