On Monday, the New York judge presiding over Donald Trump’s historic criminal prosecution found him in contempt of a gag order and threatened to imprison him if he violated it again.
Trump, 77, is accused of fabricating company papers to reimburse his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels only days before the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
Judge Juan Merchan found Trump in contempt of court and fined him $1,000 for violating the gag order, which prohibits him from publicly disparaging witnesses, jurors, court officials, and their relatives.
However, Merchan stated that the fines—Trump was also fined a total of $9,000 last week—were not functioning as a “deterrent” and that he would have to consider jail time for future offenses.
“As much as I do not want to impose a jail sanction…, I want you to understand I will,” Merchan told Trump, adding that he understood the “magnitude of such a decision.”
“At the end if the day I have a job to do and part of that job is to maintain the dignity of the justice system,” the judge said, calling Trump’s defiance a “direct attack on the rule of law.”
Merchan’s ruling came at the start of the third week of testimony in the trial of the Republican presidential candidate for covering up hush money payments to Daniels in a scheme to avoid potentially disastrous publicity just before election day.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer who has become a bitter foe of his former boss, are both expected to testify at some point during the trial.
‘Crisis’
Hope Hicks, Trump’s former close advisor, testified on Friday about the “crisis” that gripped his 2016 presidential campaign after a video surfaced of him talking about groping women.
Hicks said she was “a little stunned” by the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump spoke about groping women’s genitalia.
“There was consensus among us all that the tape was damaging, this was a crisis,” she said.
Hicks was a crucial figure in Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign, when the alleged hush money payments to Daniels occurred.
According to prosecutors, fear over the footage prompted a Trump campaign effort to silence Daniels over her allegation of a 2006 sexual encounter with the married Trump. Donald Trump denies ever having sex with Daniels.
The trial has captivated the legal and political establishment as Trump aims to retake the White House from President Joe Biden in the November election.
In addition to the New York lawsuit, Trump has been charged in Washington and Georgia with conspiracy to reverse the results of Biden’s 2020 election victory.
He is also accused of illegally retaining massive amounts of top-secret information that were seized from the White House after his presidency and transported to his home in Florida.