OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys have appealed Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order in a New York court in an effort to have it overturned.
The appeal was filed on Wednesday. The order restricts the former president from discussing jurors, attorneys, court staff, and the judge’s family, which Trump argues infringes upon his First Amendment rights.
“President Trump has filed a notice to appeal the unconstitutional and un-American gag order imposed by conflicted Judge Juan Merchan in the lawless Manhattan DA case,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign.
“The threat to throw the 45th President of the United States and the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election in jail for exercising his First Amendment rights is a Third World authoritarian tactic typical of crooked Joe Biden and his comrades,” he added.
For the past several weeks, Trump has been in court facing 34 charges of falsifying business records and has been restricted in what he can publicly say about the case. His appeal comes after a lower appeals court rejected his attempt to have the gag order lifted.
“We find that Justice Merchan properly weighed petitioner’s First Amendment Rights against the court’s historical commitment to ensuring the fair administration of justice in criminal cases, and the right of persons related or tangentially related to the criminal proceedings from being free from threats, intimidation, harassment, and harm,” the appeals court said on Tuesday.
Merchan has fined Trump 10 times — $1,000 each — for violating his gag order. The judge has not placed any witnesses for the prosecution under a similar order.
“You know [the judge is] rushing the trial like crazy. Nobody’s ever seen a thing go like this. That jury was picked so fast — 95% Democrats. The area’s mostly all Democrat. You think of it as a — just a purely Democrat area. It’s a very unfair situation, that I can tell you,” Trump said in an interview with Real America’s Voice last month.
Merchan, a donor to President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, stated in his ruling last week that he might have to imprison Trump if the gag order was violated again.
Georgetown University law school professor Jonathan Turley made some critical observations about Merchan, in particular citing what he believes is a “reversible error.”
Turley claims that Merchan may have made a mistake by allowing prosecutors, under the direction of Michael Colangelo, a former official in the Biden administration who served as acting associate attorney general, to assert that Trump was involved in breaking federal election laws regarding $130,000 in hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
The Federal Election Commission subsequently determined that those payments were not campaign-related, and federal prosecutors in New York found nothing improper when they examined the case around 2018.
“I got to tell you, I think this judge may have already committed a reversible error,” Turley told “Fox and Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “He could try to amend it, he could try to change it in his instructions, but that jury has now been told repeatedly that there are federal election crimes here, strongly suggesting that the payment to Stormy Daniels did violate federal election laws. That’s just not true.”
He then turned his attention to former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who has served prison time for lying under oath but who is expected to be one of the prosecution’s star witnesses.
“Michael Cohen is literally going to tell that jury, ‘Please send my client to jail for following my legal advice,’” Turley said. “All of the stuff that they are talking about, he set up, he structured this and told his client that, ‘we could do this.’”
“It’s a bizarre moment,” Turley added.
