Donald Trump’s court cases clustered in lower Manhattan continued to pick up speed Thursday — as the former president was temporarily freed from a gag order and prosecutors argued his political power shouldn’t shield him from accountability.
Trump’s lawyers convinced a mid-level appeals court to temporarily lift Judge Arthur Engoron’s orders prohibiting them and Trump from commenting on his court staff during an emergency hearing uptown.
“While the desire to protect his staff may seem understandable, the gag orders, as entered, are not narrowly tailored to do so,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their appeal to the First Department appellate division earlier this week, further arguing the orders violated Trump’s free speech rights.
Engoron issued a narrow gag order after learning of Trump’s disparaging Truth Social post about his principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, at his fraud trial on Oct. 3, which was published while the former president was in the courthouse. It barred him from commenting on the three civil servants who work in Engoron’s courtroom, advising him on the law. Trump’s been fined $15,000 for violating it twice.
Engoron expanded the order on Nov. 3 to include Trump’s lawyers when they continued to cast aspersions about his relationship with his clerk, citing worries over his staff’s safety amid “hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters, and packages” his chambers had received since the trial started.
The gag order did not apply to comments about the judge, something he noted Trump’s side had taken full advantage of. The Republican presidential frontrunner has posted reams of highly disparaging content about the Manhattan jurist online.
The development was one of several to emerge in Trump’s unwinding New York cases.
In new court filings, prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said his belief that his “politically powerful” stature should shield him from legal jeopardy should be rejected along with his bid to nix his criminal hush money case.
Opposing Trump’s request last month to get the case thrown out of court and other remedies, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo told Judge Juan Merchan the ex-president’s outlandish requests “mischaracterize the factual record and disregard controlling law.”
“[Trump] repeatedly suggests that because he is a current presidential candidate, the ordinary rules for criminal law and procedure should be applied differently here,” Colangelo wrote to Judge Juan Merchan.
“This argument is essentially an attempt to evade criminal responsibility because [Trump] is politically powerful.”
Colangelo said Trump was “simply wrong” in arguing the DA had not uncovered new evidence of his guilt, revealing prosecutors have gleaned fresh details from “campaign insiders” that provided “powerful evidence” of his criminal intent.
“[Both] at the time he and his confederates executed the election fraud scheme and later when he sought to conceal that criminal scheme by falsifying business records,” reads the filing.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the indictment returned by a grand jury in March, which marked the first in history against a former or current U.S. president. He’s accused of concealing a series of checks to his former fixer Michael Cohen in 2017 as reimbursement for a hush money transaction to porn star Stormy Daniels the year before.
Prosecutors say the payment to Daniels was intended to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election as part of a “catch and kill scheme” to identify, buy, and bury negative stories that could impede his road to the White House.
As he sits atop the polls in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump faces 91 felonies along the East Coast and a slew of lawsuits demanding hundreds of millions of dollars for alleged conduct before, during, and after his presidency.
He denies all allegations, characterizing his cases as part of a Democrat-led “witch hunt!” intended to prevent him from regaining power.
This developing story will be updated.
With News Wire Services
