So far we’ve had Judge Chutkan impose a gag order to keep Trump from criticizing her and her people, and now we have another judge who decided to impose a gag order on Trump’s lawyers.
At this rate how long until there’s a gag order on half the country?
A New York judge ruled Friday that a limited gag order on Donald Trump should also apply to his attorneys, citing their remarks about his staff and the deluge of threats and harassment directed at his office since the former president’s fraud trial began.
“The threat of, and actual, violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well-documented,” Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron wrote in a fiery court order Friday afternoon.
Innovatively, this is a gag order prohibiting pointing out shady behavior by the judge.
Friday’s order prohibits attorneys in the case from making any public statements, in or out of court, about confidential communications between the judge and his staff. But they can still refer to the clerk in the context of court schedules and procedure.
What does that involve?
Engoron’s newest order singled out two of Trump’s lawyers, Christopher Kise and Alina Habba, for making what he said were “repeated, inappropriate remarks” about the same clerk Trump attacked.
Kise and Habba say their chief complaint is the judge’s habit of using handwritten notes to communicate with his law clerk, which Kise said creates “an appearance of impropriety.”
The clerk sits to Engoron’s right, opposite the witness box. Passing written notes allows them to communicate without disrupting the proceedings.
And what horrifying threats did the newly gagged lawyers make?
Nonetheless, Kise has tried to paint the notes as something sinister and conspiratorial, as if the law clerk is a puppet master.
“There is someone else who is sending you information on a very, very frequent basis,” he said to Engoron in court Thursday.
The game that’s being played here is very familiar to conservatives. And especially anyone involved in the old online SJW wars. Someone criticizes lefty overreaches in the most moderate terms. The lefty in question claims to be in hiding and terrified of death threats. Immediately the entire argument is deemed to be off-limits.
Obviously, this only works one way.
Engoron is claiming that he needs to gag lawyers for making restrained remarks about his behavior because other people might then send threats to his office. Considering the nature of politics today, I don’t doubt that death threats have come in, but death threats would be coming in anyway considering the nature of the case. Gagging defense counsel because some people are sending death threats is the kind of rationale that provides an open-ended argument for silencing everyone involved in the case because someone, somewhere, might be inspired to send death threats.
And then why even have a trial, when the judge can just go straight to the sentence.