(Bloomberg) -- A New York appeals court rejected Donald Trump’s request to lift a gag order against him in his hush-money criminal case, which he says blocks him from fully responding to Kamala Harris’ claim that the Nov. 5 election is a choice between a prosecutor and a “convicted felon.”
The order barring Trump from publicly commenting on prosecutors involved in the case until after he’s sentenced is necessary because Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff continue to receive outside messages that “pose a significant and imminent threat,” the appeals court said in a brief order Thursday.
The decision was issued two days after Trump’s lawyers argued in a court filing that the gag order was giving an unfair advantage to Vice President Harris, the presumed Democratic nominee and a former California attorney general, who has made Trump’s guilty verdict the central focus of her campaign.
“The gag order is blatantly un-American as it continues to gag President Trump, the leading candidate in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, said in a statement after the ruling.
A Manhattan jury on May 30 found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. Trump denies wrongdoing and claims without evidence that the case — along with three other criminal prosecutions — is part of a Democratic “witch hunt” to keep him from regaining the White House.
The gag order, intended to protect the safety of individuals involved in the case, bars Trump from commenting on prosecutors or family members of the judge or court staff. Justice Juan Merchan narrowed the order after the trial to allow Trump to comment on witnesses during his appeal, which is ongoing.
The former president filed an appeal weeks ago seeking to lift the entire gag order, arguing the remaining prohibitions violated his First Amendment right to free speech during his presidential campaign and barred him from fully explaining why he believes the case is politically motivated.
On July 30, Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked the appeals court to expedite its decision on the gag order in light of President Joe Biden’s abrupt exit from the race and his replacement by Harris, which he said increased the urgency of the request.
Trump “faces constant threat of punishment and fines due to alleged violations of the gag order and suffers irreparable First Amendment harms by being subjected to constant political attacks without being able to fully respond and defend himself,” Blanche said in the filing.
Since Harris emerged as Trump’s main Democratic rival, the former president’s campaign has been scrambling to settle on effective messages to attack the vice president, a Black and Asian-American woman with a history in law enforcement, who at 59 is nearly two decades younger than her Republican rival.
Trump argued that he should be allowed to directly criticize the daughter of Justice Merchan. The judge’s daughter has worked for a digital marketing agency that had Harris as a client. Trump also wants to publicly say that one of the lead prosecutors is politically motivated because he left his job as a senior official at the Justice Department in the Biden administration to work for Bragg in late 2022.
Both of those arguments were raised by Trump’s lawyers in court on past occasions to illustrate alleged bias and were rejected by the judge.
(Adds court’s decision on Trump’s request.)
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