When Donald Trump takes the debate stage tonight against President Biden in Atlanta, he will be partially unshackled from a gag order imposed on him during his criminal trial in Manhattan.
And while Trump has complained that the measure is still too restrictive, it’s certainly loose enough to permit him to lash out at the key witnesses in the trial, and at the proceeding itself, where he became the first former president to be found guilty of a crime.
There’s no evidence that Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw the trial in Manhattan, relaxed the gag order because of the debate. But the judge’s timing will have the effect of giving Trump the green light to complain more vocally about the case, in which he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, Merchan said Trump can now broadly go after the jury that convicted him, although he will have to wait until after he is sentenced next month to publicly assail others involved in the proceeding, including prosecutors and their relatives.
Most important, the judge’s ruling opened the door for Trump to immediately attack two of the state’s main witnesses. One is Michael Cohen, his former fixer and lawyer, who told the jury how he paid off a porn star on Trump’s behalf in the run-up to the 2016 election. The other is the porn star herself, Stormy Daniels, who testified in detail about a one-night sexual encounter she had with Trump at a golf tournament in the 2000s.