Manhattan DA seeks to largely maintain Trump’s gag order, citing threats to prosecutors

NEW YORK — Prosecutors who handled Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial asked a judge to keep in place most of the restrictions imposed by a gag order, but conceded it was no longer necessary to limit the former president’s comments about witnesses who testified against him.

In a filing made public Friday, prosecutors cited “intensified” threats against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, his family and the office’s staff, disclosing that two people involved in the case received bomb threats at their homes on the first day of the trial. Prosecutors described those threats as “directly connected to defendant’s dangerous rhetoric about this prosecution.”

They also wrote that officials had logged 56 “actionable” threats during and immediately following the trial, as well as hundreds of threatening emails and phone calls.

Trump has been fighting for weeks to overturn the gag order, which bars him from publicly attacking witnesses, court staff and prosecutors other than Bragg, as well as family members of Bragg and of the judge. During the trial, he was twice held in contempt for 10 public statements found to violate the gag order.

Since Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in late May of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, he has asked Justice Juan Merchan to repeal the gag order, and he has also sought to overturn it through the appellate courts. Earlier this week, New York’s highest court dismissed Trump’s appeal, saying that “no substantial constitutional question is directly involved.”

The former president is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11.

Trump has argued that the gag order should be terminated now that the trial is over. He also says the restrictions on his speech harm his ability to campaign for president.

“Now that the trial is concluded, the concerns articulated by the government and the Court do not justify continued restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump — who remains the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election — and the American people,” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a letter to Merchan.

In their new filing, prosecutors disagreed that the conclusion of the trial should be grounds to lift restrictions on Trump’s comments about jurors or about prosecutors, court staff or their families. In arguing to maintain the gag order with respect to jurors, prosecutors wrote that “defendant’s singular history of inflammatory and threatening public statements includes attacks on jurors in other proceedings.”

Trump faces criminal charges in three other pending cases. In one of those cases — the federal case accusing him of conspiring to subvert the 2020 election — he is under a separate gag order. And in the case accusing him of hoarding classified documents, prosecutors are requesting yet another gag.

Manhattan prosecutors cited several public comments Trump has made since his conviction in the hush money case, writing that Trump “has not exempted the jurors from his alarming rhetoric that he would have ‘every right’ to seek retribution” against those who participated in his trial.

“There thus remains a critical need to protect the jurors in this case from attacks by defendant and those he inspires to action,” prosecutors wrote.

They allowed, though, that Trump should no longer be prevented from speaking about trial witnesses, perhaps bringing Trump one step closer to seizing on a few of his favorite rhetorical targets, namely Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, and Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom Trump sought to silence.

Though Cohen and Daniels were frequent recipients of Trump’s criticism before the gag order was imposed, he has been barred from speaking about them since they testified against him, helping secure his conviction.

But now, prosecutors wrote, “the compelling interest in protecting the witnesses’ ability to testify without interference is no longer present.”