Late on Monday, Justice Juan Merchan tried to crack down on Trump’s latest vitriol.
Former President Donald Trump leaves the courtroom during a break in the pre-trial hearing in a hash money case in criminal court on March 25, 2024, in New York City. | Pool photo by Mary Altaffer
“It’s clearly strategic,” said Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer under Trump but has become a frequent critic of the former president.denigrating the adult daughterbarring Trump from attacking the judge’s own family. Merchan also expanded the gag to cover the family of the lead prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
In his latest fusillade on social media, unleashed within days of Merchan’s original gag order, Trump called Merchan’s daughter a “Rabid Trump Hater” due to her work at a digital marketing agency that has Democratic clients. And he claimed that she had used an image of Trump behind bars as a profile picture for a social media account, although a court official said she had abandoned and deleted that account, and that it had been taken over by someone else.
And in Trump’s federal criminal case in Washington, D.C., on charges that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he shared a post claiming that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is from a “Marxist family.” He also went after the family of the lead prosecutor in the case, special counsel Jack Smith, saying that Smith’s “wife and family despise me much more than he does.”
And they wrote that “President Trump’s comments concerning Your Honor’s daughter are, properly understood, a criticism of the Court’s prior decision not to recuse itself” — a reference to Merchan’s decision last year not to step down from the case. Trump had argued at the time that Merchan should recuse himself due in part to his daughter’s work for Democratic candidates.
Trump’s lawyer, John Lauro, defended the comments as a free speech exercise. “Your Honor, I don’t think there was an attack on a family member,” Lauro said. “What it was was an indication that there might be political bias in light of Mr. Smith, and certainly a First Amendment exercise of speech would allow a criminal defendant to observe that a prosecution is politically biased.”
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