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Gagged in Manhattan

Joyce Vance

Mar 29

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On Tuesday, the Judge in the Manhattan DA’s criminal case against Trump entered a narrow, limited gag order against the former president. And it turns out that what it doesn’t prohibit is as important as what it does.

You can read the order here.

The gag order prohibits Trump from doing the following things:

Making or directing others to make public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation in the investigation or in this criminal proceeding;
Making or directing others to make public statements about (1) counsel in the case other than the District Attorney, (2) members of the court's staff and the district attorney's staff, or (3) the family members of any counsel or staff member, if those statements are made with the intent to materially interfere with, or to cause others to materially interfere with, counsel's or staff’s work in this criminal case, or with the knowledge that such interference is likely to result; and
Making or directing others to make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror in this criminal proceeding.

Trump can’t talk about witnesses or jurors. He can’t talk about court staff, the DA’s staff, or the staff of any of the lawyers. And he can’t talk about the lawyers, whether his own or assistant DAs. The exception is that he can talk about the DA himself. The Judge and his family also remain fair game.

That’s because there is some sense that it’s unseemly for a judge or top prosecutor to protect themselves. And most of the time that makes sense, because it’s unnecessary. But this is Trump. He takes what’s not in the gag order as an invitation to go there.

Trump has been on social media binge, a multi-day tirade against Judge Merchan. And his daughter. You read that right. The former president of the United States is attacking a judge’s kid.

We’ve seen Trump do this with other judges. In fact, with pretty much every judge he’s had in a civil or criminal case, with the exception of Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who is single-handedly preventing his trial on charges in the classified documents and obstruction case. Judge McAfee in Fulton County, Georgia, had to delay issuing his ruling on the Trump defendants’ request to disqualify DA Fani Willis until the Judge could get security in place for his family and himself. A woman was prosecuted for threatening Judge Chutkan in the Special Counsel’s election interference case in D.C. She called the Judge and said, “Hey you stupid slave n----- ... You are in our sights, we want to kill you.” When Trump paints a bullseye on a Judge’s back, his followers respond. He knows this. He has no excuse of saying he doesn’t know what happens when he posts on social media about a judge in one of his cases. His followers have demonstrated their propensity towards threats and even violence over and over again. No one should forget that Trump’s mob built a gallows on the National Mall and called for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged. Trump knows what he is doing.

So, knowing the gag order didn’t prohibit it, Trump launched a vicious string of attacks against the Judge and his daughter on his Truth Social website, calling the Judge “compromised” and calling the gag order “vicious.” Trump wrote that the Judge was “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

Trump claimed that Judge Merchan’s daughter called for him to be “locked up” on her Twitter account. He continued doing that today, even though a court administrator released a statement yesterday saying the daughter had shuttered her Twitter account a year ago, and that if someone was using her old handle, it was a hack.

Nothing like the former President of the United States putting an American citizen, the child of a public servant, at risk in order to try to protect himself. Trump is a real profile in courage.

This makes me both incredibly angry and profoundly sad. Like many prosecutors, I had the experience of working on an investigation that led to threats against the prosecutors. Unfortunately, that can be part of the job. But what no prosecutor, judge, juror or witness signs up for is being threatened by the president of the United States.

Judge Merchan will, in the vernacular, suck it up. He’ll ignore Trump as much as possible and take one for the rule of law. Any steps he might take to put an end to Trump’s behavior could prevent the case from going to trial on April 15 if Trump, as he almost certainly would, appealed. A restrictive gag order could provide an issue on appeal for Trump if there’s a conviction. So, as difficult as it is to watch, you can understand why the Judge will make every effort to tolerate Trump’s behavior as it applies to himself unless he crosses the line into outright criminality.

You won’t see a single Republican senator, representative, governor, or party leader condemn Trump for his dangerous, reckless behavior.

But tonight, something very unusual happened. A federal judge, Senior Judge Reggie Walton, a Bush appointee in the District of Columbia, did an interview on CNN.

The Judge told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “It’s very troubling” that judges and their families are being threatened, in a clear reference to Trump. It’s extraordinary for a sitting federal judge to do something like this, and it shows Judge Walton, who is highly respected, feels a sense of urgency about where we are headed.

When necessary, judges protect participants in trials, not themselves. I can’t remember a situation where a litigant has threatened judges and their families as persistently as Trump has. It is unthinkable. In a normal case, a defendant’s lawyers would not tolerate it. They would sit their client down for a talk and put an end to it. But Trump’s behavior is so widely tolerated that he gets away with it. It fell to a sitting member of the judiciary to express outrage in this unusual fashion.

Other voices should join in. If it takes something as unusual as a chorus of voices from sitting senior judges, so be it. We can do our part too. Make sure you let folks around you know what’s going on. Ask how they would feel if Trump exposed their child an attack, if he singled them out for no good reason. It’s easy to assume that others know everything you know about Trump, but I’m frequently reminded that’s not the case. So it’s important to make sure people face the truth about him. Who doesn’t want a president who threatens people’s kids and hawks $69 bibles ahead of Easter Sunday?