NEW YORK — Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at the New York judge who put him under a gag order ahead of his April 15 hush-money criminal trial, making a fallacious claim about his daughter and urging him to step aside from the case.
In a social media post, the former president suggested without evidence that Judge Juan M. Merchan was kowtowing to his daughter’s interests as a Democratic political consultant. He also made a claim — later repudiated by court officials — that she had posted a social media photo showing Trump behind bars.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, complained on his Truth Social platform that the gag order issued Tuesday was “illegal, un-American, unConstitutional.” He said that Merchan, a veteran Manhattan jurist, was “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement” by Democratic rivals. Trump claimed that Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, whose firm has worked on campaigns for President Joe Biden and other Democrats, had recently posted a photo on social media depicting her “obvious goal” of seeing him jailed.
In a statement, a spokesperson for New York’s state court system said that claim was false and that the social media account Trump was referencing no longer belongs to Loren Merchan. It appears to have been taken over by someone else after she deleted it about a year ago, court spokesperson Al Baker said.
The account on X, formerly known as Twitter, “is not linked to her email address, nor has she posted under that screenname since she deleted the account. Rather, it represents the reconstitution, last April, and manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned,” Baker said.
Messages seeking comment were left for Loren Merchan and Trump’s campaign.
Trump did not link to the purported photo, but an X account under the name “LM” showed a photo illustration of an imprisoned Trump as its profile picture Wednesday morning. It was later changed to an image of Vice President Kamala Harris as a child.
Loren Merchan’s consulting firm had linked to that account in its social media posts in past years, but it is now private with no posts displayed and states that it joined the platform in April 2023, after Baker said she deleted it. Usernames on X can be taken over by other users after they’re deleted.
The gag order, which prosecutors had requested, bars Trump from either making or directing other people to make public statements on his behalf about jurors and potential witnesses in the hush-money trial, such as his lawyer turned nemesis Michael Cohen and porn star Stormy Daniels. It also prohibits any statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families.