NEW YORK — The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan held him in contempt Tuesday, fining the former president $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order and warning that he could go to jail if he continued to attack witnesses and jurors.
“The court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said — an ominous warning to open the third week of Trump’s trial. He added that although he was “keenly aware of, and protective of, defendant’s First Amendment rights,” he would jail Trump “if necessary and appropriate.”
The judge’s crackdown injected instant tension into the day’s proceedings before three new witnesses took the stand in the first criminal trial of a former American president.
The most significant was Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented porn actor Stormy Daniels when she received the $130,000 hush-money payment at the center of the case. Davidson negotiated the payout with Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign in order to silence Daniels’ account of a sexual encounter with Trump.
Davidson began his testimony by recounting his representation of another woman, Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who said she’d had an affair with Trump in 2006. He negotiated a payout from The National Enquirer that kept McDougal’s story from going public.
In a striking stretch of testimony, Davidson read aloud for the jury a series of off-color text exchanges from 2016, telling an Enquirer editor that he had a “blockbuster Trump story” about Trump cheating on his wife with McDougal. When some of McDougal’s female friends urged her to go to ABC News instead, Davidson warned that the story might slip away if the Enquirer didn’t pay, and fast.
“Time is of the essence,” Davidson wrote. “The girl is being cornered by the estrogen mafia,” a message that Davidson, mortified by reading his years-old remarks to the jury, called “a very unfortunate, regrettable text.”
The testimony offered another remarkable moment in a trial whose early days have been full of them: a former president and current Republican nominee watching helplessly as two strangers exposed details of a sex scandal that he had fought to keep secret.
It also underscored the wide array of evidence at the prosecution’s disposal as it assembled its case against the former president. On Tuesday alone, prosecutors elicited live testimony from Davidson and three other witnesses, a string of provocative text messages, videos of Trump campaign events, and excerpts from a deposition the former president gave in a separate case — all woven into a story that they say paints Trump as a criminal.
Davidson’s testimony helped acquaint jurors with a complex chronology: Trump was married to Melania Trump in 2006 when McDougal said they had their affair. When the text exchanges were written a decade later, he was becoming the official Republican presidential nominee and beginning a long, hostile takeover of the party.
As Davidson got deeper into the details, his testimony also bolstered a key component of the prosecution’s contention that the Enquirer was involved in a secret plot to boost Trump’s candidacy.
The supermarket tabloid’s former publisher, David Pecker, previously testified that he had agreed to buy and bury potentially damaging stories, teaming up with Cohen to protect Trump’s candidacy. Pecker also notified Cohen that Daniels was shopping her story as well, setting in motion the $130,000 hush-money deal.
Prosecutors have charged the former president, who faces up to four years in prison, with falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursement of Cohen. Trump and Cohen had a falling-out years ago, and their mutual hatred has become a major motif of the trial.
It reappeared Tuesday in Merchan’s decision to hold Trump in contempt, determining that the former president had flouted the gag order by making nine public statements on social media and on his campaign website in which he attacked the jury and certain witnesses, including Cohen. The judge ordered Trump to remove the posts by Tuesday afternoon.
Trump, who was accompanied in court by a larger-than-usual entourage, including his son, Eric Trump; his campaign adviser, Susie Wiles; and Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, did not immediately react to the judge’s ruling. During a break soon afterward, he stood and glowered at the room.
The judge’s ruling and admonition came one week after a fiery hearing in which prosecutors had argued that Trump’s statements threatened the trial.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, contended then that the former president had not violated the order, but Merchan chastised him for failing to marshal facts or legal precedent in support of Trump.
The ruling that ensued marked a nadir in relations between the court and Trump. The former president has attended every day of the trial, though he has largely been relegated to the sidelines, complaining to cameras afterward about the gag order and the judge. Now, with the financial penalty — and the specter of jail time — his fury could reach a boiling point.
Already, prosecutors have alerted the judge to four new potential violations. Those were not covered by Merchan’s Tuesday order and will be discussed at another hearing Thursday morning.
The judge’s decision and his questioning at the hearing last week took aim at two of Trump’s typical tactics: his tendency to lie and his habit of suggesting that every action he takes is political, even when it concerns his criminal cases.
Merchan for the most part rejected Blanche’s argument that Trump’s posts did not violate the gag order because they were responses to political attacks by adversaries who, by coincidence, happen to be potential witnesses.
One probable witness, Cohen, has slammed Trump on social media, though last week he vowed to “cease posting anything about Donald,” a decision he said he made “out of respect for Judge Merchan and the prosecutors.”
If Cohen breaks his silence, he may not be protected from Trump’s attacks: The judge, in his Tuesday order, suggested that if witnesses provoked Trump, the former president might be free to respond.
The gag order, Merchan wrote, cannot “be used as a sword instead of a shield by potential witnesses.” And in what appeared to be an oblique reference to Cohen, the judge added that he “may very well consider the propriety of continuing the limitation” on Trump’s speech “as it relates to certain individuals.”
The other witness whom Trump attacked is Daniels.
The former president denies that he and Daniels had sex, and in one post for which he was fined, he attacked Daniels on his website Truth Social, reviving a years-old statement in which she denied the affair. Trump added a comment falsely portraying the statement as newly discovered: “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND! WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT?”
Trump did not note that the original statement was from January 2018 or that Daniels had recanted it not long afterward, explaining that she had denied the sexual encounter because of a nondisclosure agreement.
During last week’s hearing, Merchan focused on Trump’s lie about when the statement came to light.
“So that’s not true?” he asked Blanche.
“That’s not true,” Blanche conceded.In Tuesday’s ruling, Merchan agreed with prosecutors that the former president had crossed the line by attacking Cohen and Daniels, except in one post in which he appeared to call them “sleaze bags.” In a nod to Blanche’s argument that Trump can respond to political attacks, the judge found a “tenuous correlation” between Trump’s post and Cohen’s denunciation of the former president’s latest run for the White House.
Merchan held Trump in contempt for the nine other statements that prosecutors flagged, including times when Trump reposted other people’s comments. If Trump selected a post to share with his followers, the judge held, “it is counterintuitive and indeed absurd” not to attribute the reposts to Trump.
In one instance, Trump had quoted a Fox News commentator, Jesse Watters, denigrating potential jurors in the case as “undercover liberal activists.”
A day after the post, one of the jurors begged off the panel.Merchan initially imposed the order on Trump in late March, barring public statements about any witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or court staff, as well as their families. But within a week, Trump found a loophole and repeatedly attacked the judge’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant.
At the request of prosecutors, Merchan then expanded the measure to cover his relatives and relatives of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Merchan and Bragg are not covered by the order, and Trump is free to attack them.
Trump often assails people he used to praise and commends those he once pilloried.
Just before Davidson took the stand Tuesday, for example, prosecutors showed a video in which Trump had praised Cohen as “a very talented lawyer.”