The New York judge presiding over Donald Trump's historic criminal trial again found the former US president in contempt of a gag order on Monday, May 6, and threatened to jail him for further violations.
Judge Juan Merchan held Trump in contempt of court and fined him $1,000 on Monday for a violation of the gag order prohibiting him from publicly attacking witnesses, jurors or court staff and their relatives. Trump was also fined a total of $9,000 last week. Yet Merchan said these penalties were not serving as a "deterrent" and he would have to consider jail time for further violations.
"As much as I do not want to impose a jail sanction [...] I want you to understand I will," Merchan told Trump, who sat silently at the defense table dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie. "At the end of 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."
The judge acknowledged that putting him behind bars for contempt would be a weighty decision and a logistical challenge. Trump receives around-the-clock US Secret Service protection as a former president and Merchan said "the last thing I want to do is put you in jail." "I also worry about the people who would have to execute that," he said.
Merchan's ruling came at the start of the third week of testimony in the high-stakes trial of the Republican White House candidate, the first former president to face criminal charges. Trump, 77, is charged with falsifying business records to reimburse his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment made to former porn star Stormy Daniels just days ahead of the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was threatening at the time to go public with her story about a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, a salacious revelation that could have been potentially damaging to his White House campaign. According to prosecutors, panic over the tape triggered a Trump campaign effort to silence Daniels over her claim of a sexual encounter with the married Trump. Trump denies ever having sex with Daniels.
In addition to the New York case, Trump has been indicted in Washington and Georgia on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Biden. He also faces charges of illegally storing huge quantities of top-secret documents taken from the White House after his presidency to his home in Florida.