OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump appeared in lower Manhattan, New York, on Tuesday for his arraignment in the case brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 charges regarding allegations that he falsified business records related to adult film star Stormy Daniels’ hush-money case. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in a case involving his purported role in hush money payments to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, allegedly to keep Daniels quiet about an affair the two of them had in 2006.
The Manhattan judge presiding over the case against Trump warned the former president on Tuesday to not make statements that could possibly lead to violence. However, the judge did not issue a gag order, which would have limited Trump’s ability to speak about the case.
Judge Juan Merchan said that Trump and other witnesses that prosecutors intend to call should “refrain from making statements likely to incite violence or create civil unrest.”
“Prosecutor Christopher Conroy raised Trump’s recent use of incendiary language on his Truth Social media platform, highlighting a number of the posts during the proceeding and handing the judge several examples printed on paper. Because of the posts, Conroy said, prosecutors are working with Trump’s attorneys to draw up a protective order that would bar the ex-prez from posting sensitive information turned over to his legal team as part of the discovery process in the case,” the New York Post reported.
“The order currently being hashed out would bar Trump from providing the discovery material to any third party and from posting it on social media. Trump would also be required to review any shared sensitive material in the presence of his attorneys, and would not be allowed to take physical copies of such documents with him,” the outlet added.
Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, responded in court by arguing that the grand jury process has already been riddled with leaks and that the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, addressed reporters about his testimony in front of the building where the grand jury met.
Judge Merchan requested that Trump’s team and the prosecutors’ office work together and send him an agreed-upon order detailing how Trump can interact with sensitive material in the case as it pertains to what he can post on social media.
Beyond that, Bragg’s case against Trump is so weak that several liberal outlets are even pointing it out.
Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox, wrote: “There is something painfully anticlimactic about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump. It concerns not Trump’s efforts to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States, but his alleged effort to cover up a possible extramarital affair with a porn star. And there’s a very real risk that this indictment will end in an even bigger anticlimax. It is unclear that the felony statute that Trump is accused of violating actually applies to him.”
Mark Stern, a writer for the liberal outlet Slate, published a story titled, “The Trump Indictment Is Not the Slam-Dunk Case Democrats Wanted.”
Former Whitewater deputy counsel Sol Wisenberg said: “The question to ask yourself in a case like this [is], ‘Would a case like this be brought against anybody else, whether he or she be president, former president or a regular citizen?’ The answer is… no. You can debate all day long whether or not… Trump should be indicted related to the records at Mar-a-Lago, whether or not he should be indicted with respect to Jan. 6 incitement of lawless activity… Those are real crimes if they occurred, and he committed them. This is preposterous.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said in an interview with Fox News that the case is “outrageous” and that “[Bragg] is attempting to bootstrap [a] federal crime into a state case. And if that is the basis for the indictment, I think it’s rather outrageous.”
