“The last thing I would want to do is send him to prison, 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,” Judge Juan Merchán told Donald Trump this morning, in the opening of the third week of the first criminal trial of a former president in New York. It warned him of the consequences he could face if he continues to make public comments about the trial despite the gag order imposed in the Stormy Daniels case, which the former president has skipped for the tenth time, which has increased his fine to pay up to $10,000 ($1,000 for each gag order violation).
The magnate's repeated attacks on the members of the jury, the witnesses, the prosecutor Alvin Bragg and Judge Merchán in their public appearances represent “a direct attack on the rule of law,” the magistrate has asserted forcefully. If he continues with this attitude, “this court should consider punishing him with going to prison,” he warned him.
The tenth sanction is due to a comment against her former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who financed the payment of $130,000 to the porn actress in 2016 to buy her silence, and who plans to testify in the coming days. The prosecution asked the judge to consider three other comments, which have been rejected.
The judge has highlighted his discomfort with what it would mean to sanction Trump with prison if he continues to violate the gag order. “You are the former president of the United States and possibly also the next president,” he noted, “taking that step would disrupt the judicial process.” Merchán has explained that imprisoning Trump would require the participation of several law enforcement agencies, such as the Secret Service and the New York Department of Corrections.
The former president also faces another gag order in the Washington case, in which he is accused of trying to reverse the results of the 2020 elections, although he has not been fined on any occasion in that case, whose trial still has no set date. Of start. In addition to these two cases, he is charged in Florida for having taken and retained classified documents when leaving the White House, and in Georgia, for attempting to manipulate the vote count in that state in 2020.
In a speech in Palm Beach (Florida), Trump yesterday escalated his rhetoric against what he considers a “witch hunt” promoted by President Joe Biden. Concretely, he compared his administration to the “Gestapo”: “it's the only thing they can do. And it is the only way they are going to win, in his opinion, but in reality it is killing them,” he assured.
His words received a rebuke from the White House on Sunday: “Instead of echoing the horrific rhetoric of fascists, having lunch with neo-Nazis, and stoking debunked conspiracy theories that have cost the lives of brave police officers, President Biden is uniting the American people around our shared democratic values and the rule of law, an approach that has achieved the largest reduction in violent crime in 50 years,” Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement.
