The New York judge presiding in Donald Trump’s criminal trial fined the former president $9,000 on Tuesday for nine violations of a gag order designed to protect trial participants from his abuse, imposing the maximum financial penalty allowed under New York state law.
The judge, Juan Merchan, ruled that Trump had violated the order in nine out of 10 instances alleged by prosecutors. Merchan ordered Trump to remove the offending posts on Truth Social and his campaign website and warned that further violations could result in jail time.
“Defendant is hereby warned that the Court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders and that if necessary and appropriate under the circumstances, it will impose an incarceratory punishment,” Merchan wrote in an eight-page order.
Trump may find himself subject to further penalties as soon as Thursday, when the judge is scheduled to hear arguments from Manhattan district attorney prosecutors that Trump violated the gag order several more times since they submitted their initial list of 10.
But the judge also admonished Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen – the main target of Trump’s attacks, along with Stormy Daniels – and wrote that he might be exempted from the gag order if he continued to deliberately aggravate Trump on social media.
“The underlying purpose of the restriction on extrajudicial statements is to protect the integrity of these proceedings,” Merchan wrote. “If a protected party turns that underlying purpose on its head, it becomes apparent that the protected party likely does not need to be protected.”
For weeks, Trump has railed against the 34-count indictment, which charges him with falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments he made to Daniels allegedly to protect his 2016 presidential campaign from negative headlines in violation of state campaign laws.
Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche claimed at a hearing last week that the majority of the posts were responses to ad hominem or political attacks against Trump, while others were reposts of links to New York Post articles or views expressed by others, including the prominent Fox News host Jesse Watters.
The judge appeared deeply skeptical of those arguments. He questioned why, in one post, Trump waited until after a challenge against the gag order was rejected by a New York appeals court to “respond” to a jibe from Cohen, instead of replying immediately.
The contempt hearing ended particularly poorly for Trump when the judge interrupted Blanche to clarify that it was wrong to characterize one post as just reposting Watters’ words. Trump “manipulated” the quote by making his own additions, and then put quote marks around it, Merchan said.
The scope of the gag order against Trump was expanded earlier this month, after Merchan rebuked Trump for making statements about the case he deemed “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” ahead of the trial in New York supreme court.
Under the order, Trump cannot make, or direct others to make, public statements about trial witnesses concerning their roles in the investigation and at trial, prosecutors, and members of the court staff or the district attorney’s staff. Merchan and the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, are not covered by the gag order.
