A New York judge partially lifted a gag order on Donald Trump following his conviction on criminal charges stemming from an effort to influence the 2016 election by buying a porn star’s silence. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

A New York judge partially lifted a gag order on Donald Trump on Tuesday following the Republican presidential candidate’s conviction on criminal charges stemming from an effort to influence the 2016 election by buying a porn star’s silence. The revised order now allows Trump to speak publicly about witnesses in the case and removes a prohibition on his commenting about the jury, but keeps in place restrictions on his statements about individual prosecutors and others involved in the case.

A separate order restricting Trump or anyone else from identifying members of the anonymous jury remains in effect, according to Tuesday’s order from Justice Juan Merchan. Trump’s lawyers argued the gag order was stifling his campaign speech and said it might limit his ability to respond to attacks from Democratic President Joe Biden during their forthcoming debate on Thursday.

Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said limits on Trump’s speech about trial witnesses were no longer needed. But they urged Merchan to keep in place restrictions on his comments about jurors, court staff and individual prosecutors, citing risks to their safety.

In the first criminal trial of a U.S. president, a Manhattan jury on May 30 found Trump guilty of covering up his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who was threatening to go public before the 2016 election with her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. Trump, elected to a four-year term that year, denies the alleged 2006 encounter and has vowed to appeal his conviction. Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, four days before his party convenes to formally nominate him to challenge Biden for president ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

Merchan imposed the gag order before the trial began in April, finding that Trump’s history of threatening statements posed a risk of derailing the proceedings. The judge fined Trump $10,000 for violations of the order during the seven-week trial and warned him on May 6 that he would be jailed if he ran afoul of the order again.

In arguing some restrictions were still needed, prosecutors said Trump’s supporters had attempted to identify members of the anonymous jury and threatened violence against them. “There thus remains a critical need to protect the jurors in this case from attacks by defendant and those he inspires to action,” they wrote in a June 20 court filing.

Defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove in a June 11 court filing argued that holding Trump accountable for “harassing communications” by “independent third parties” violated his right to free speech.

They said Trump’s political opponents were using the restrictions as a “political sword.” They also said Trump was unable to respond to public attacks from Cohen and Daniels, who testified on behalf of the prosecution at trial.

The order does not prevent Trump from criticizing the case or from speaking about Merchan and Bragg.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump, with attorney Todd Blanche, speaks to the press amid his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs, at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City, on May 10, 2024. Trump is accused of falsifying business records in a scheme to cover up an alleged sexual encounter with adult film actress Stormy Daniels to shield his 2016 election campaign from adverse publicity.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Donald Trump’s defence attorney and Stormy Daniels went head to head on Thursday during cross-examination of the porn star’s blistering testimony, the line of questioning occasionally meandering into the bizarre and even earning a critique afterwards from the judge.

Under examination that frequently veered hostile, Ms. Daniels was quick on her feet, toeing a tight line between tenacity and vulnerability as jurors watched the defense deride her career and assail her credibility.

She clapped back for hours during the most intense testimony yet in the criminal trial, which centers on whether a $130,000 hush money payment to Ms. Daniels was fraudulently covered up with the intent of influencing the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles insisted repeatedly through her questioning that Ms. Daniels, 45, had fabricated her story of a one-off sexual encounter with Trump.

“You made all this up, right?” the counsel asked at one point, prompting Ms. Daniels to respond with an emphatic “No.”

Several moments saw Ms. Daniels accuse Ms. Necheles of putting words in her mouth: “You’re trying to make me say it’s changed, but it hasn’t changed,” she said, referring to her account of events.

Team Trump vied to cast Ms. Daniels as money-grubbing, sleazy and deceptive.

Ms. Necheles grilled Ms. Daniels over her decision to pen a book that included depictions of the encounter, and her decision to promote branded products.

“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” Ms. Daniels quipped back.

In one of the more offbeat moments of the nearly eight hours of testimony, Ms. Necheles brought up interest in Ms. Daniels in tarot cards and the paranormal, in an apparent bid to cast her as unhinged.

She then moved to present Ms. Daniels as a fabulist, mocking her work as a screenwriter and director of pornographic films while alleging that it makes her good at twisting the truth.

“So you have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” said Ms. Necheles.

“Wow, that’s not how I would put it,” Ms. Daniels said.

“The sex is real. The characters names might be different. But the sex is very real. That’s why it’s pornography,” the witness continued.

If the story with Mr. Trump were untrue, she said, “I would’ve written it to be a lot better.”

Mistrial denied, again

At the close of her marathon testimony which lasted approximately eight hours over two days, the defense asked Ms. Daniels if she knew anything about Mr. Trump’s bookkeeping — the actual crux of the case.

She said she does not.

But that wasn’t the point of calling Ms. Daniels to the stand, one prosecutor said later — she was there to detail why Mr. Trump would’ve wanted to cover up her story at the finish line of his White House bid.

That reasoning came up after jurors had been dismissed for the day, during a motion hearing that saw Team Trump try once more for a mistrial.

It was again denied, but not before Judge Juan Merchan skewered Mr. Trump’s lawyers in front of him.

“I disagree with your narrative that there is any new account here. I disagree that there is any changing story,” he said, audibly irritated.

In his extraordinary dressing down of the defence’s lawyering, Mr. Merchan said their very insistence that Ms. Daniels had made the encounter up cleared the way for the prosecution to include evidence — much of it salacious — to the contrary.

Ms. Necheles spent much of her cross-hammering on the very details they were holding up as grounds for a mistrial, Mr. Merchan said, “drilling it over and over and over again into the jury’s ears.”

“I don’t understand the reason for that,” he said during his dramatic critique, asking why the defence had not objected to the presentation of those details during direct questioning.

And that Mr. Trump’s team has been attacking Ms. Daniels from the very beginning, including during opening statements, “pits your client’s word against Ms. Daniels’ word,” Mr. Merchan said.

“That, in my mind, allows The People to do what they can to rehabilitate her and corroborate her story,” he said, using a term for the prosecution.

“Your motion for a mistrial is denied.”

New York:

Stormy Daniels, the porn star at the heart of Donald Trump’s hush money case, testified in a rapt Manhattan courtroom Tuesday about a 2006 sexual encounter that precipitated the criminal trial of the former US president.

Trump, 77, is charged with falsifying business records to reimburse his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment made to Daniels to silence her on the eve of his 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, when the lurid story of marital infidelity could have sunk his campaign.

Daniels’ testimony is providing a pivotal moment in the courtroom drama rocking the scandal-plagued Republican’s attempt to recapture the White House in November.

“The people call Stormy Daniels,” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger announced as Trump, dressed in a dark blue suit and gold tie, sat stony-faced at the defense table flanked by his lawyers.

Daniels, 45, wearing a black pantsuit and heavy eyeliner, began by answering questions from Hoffinger, who walked her through her difficult childhood in Louisiana, stint as a stripper and eventually her participation in the adult film industry.

Daniels said she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe where she was employed as a greeter by the adult film company Wicked Entertainment.

Trump complimented her as the “smart one” because she was not only acting in X-rated movies but also directing them, she said.

Daniels said she was 27 at the time and Trump was “older, probably older than my father.”

She said a member of Trump’s security detail told her the real estate tycoon wanted to have dinner with her.

She said she was initially reluctant but agreed after discussing it with her publicist.

Daniels said when she arrived at the penthouse where Trump was staying he emerged wearing “silk or satin pajamas which I immediately made fun of.”

“I said ‘Does Mr Hefner know you stole his pajamas?'” she said in a reference to the outfit favored by the late Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.

Trump changed into a dress shirt and pants and they began talking about adult movies.

“He was very interested in a lot of the business stuff,” Daniels said.

Trump, who was married at the time to his current wife, Melania, suggested at one point that Daniels should be on his hit reality television show, “The Apprentice,” she said.

“I said there’s no way NBC would let me on television,” she said.

‘Startled me’

Daniels said she went to the bathroom at one point and when she emerged Trump “was on the bed between myself and the door” in boxer shorts and a T-shirt.

“It startled me,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to be there especially minus a lot of clothing.”

“The intention was pretty clear,” she said, adding that she thought to herself “great, I’ve put myself in this bad situation.”

“I was not threatened verbally or physically,” Daniels said, although there was an “imbalance of power.”

She said they had sex on the bed “in missionary position” and Trump did not wear a condom.

“I felt ashamed I didn’t stop it, didn’t say no,” Daniels said. “I told very few people.”

Trump has denied having sex with Daniels.

Prosecutors say that Trump — desperate to kill Daniels’ story before it could wreck his chances in the narrow 2016 race — illegally reimbursed Cohen, to cover up the hush money payment.

Cohen, who has become a vocal critic of his former boss, is also expected to testify at the trial as a prosecution witness.

Gag order

The courtroom face-off comes exactly six months before election day, when Trump will try to defeat Democratic President Joe Biden for a shock return to power.

Trump will be constrained from attacking Daniels after Merchan on Monday found him in contempt of court for his repeated violations of a partial gag order.

The gag order is meant to prevent Trump from using his huge media presence to attack witnesses, members of the jury and court staff in a bid to influence the trial.

Merchan said that in addition a series of already imposed fines, Trump will face the threat of jail time for future violations.

The trial is the first criminal prosecution in history of a US president and is one of four cases against the real estate tycoon.

In addition to the New York case, Trump has been indicted in Washington and Georgia on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Biden.

He also faces charges of illegally storing top-secret documents taken from the White House at his home in Florida and refusing to return them.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Prosecutors launched the hush-money trial of Donald Trump by revealing new details Monday about how they seek to prove the former president corrupted the 2016 election to bury a sex scandal, while a defence lawyer countered the payment was meant only to protect his reputation.

The trial in lower Manhattan, the first of a former president, involves 34 felony counts alleging Trump falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to stifle her claims of a sexual liaison. Prosecutors say he falsified records by claiming the reimbursements to his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who paid Daniels, were for legal fees.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo used his opening statement Monday to sketch out a criminal conspiracy involving Trump, Cohen and David Pecker, who ran the company that owned the National Enquirer and agreed to buy and bury negative news about the former president. The plot, he said, began in a May 2015 meeting in Trump Tower.

“The evidence will show this was not spin or strategy but a plan to influence the election to help Donald Trump get elected,” he said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

The trial takes place as Trump, 77, seeks to return to the White House in a rematch with President Joe Biden. It’s one of four prosecutions hanging over the presumptive Republican nominee, who calls the case election interference and a witch hunt by Democrats.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche had a different spin on the events.

“Spoiler alert: there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Blanche said. “It’s called democracy.”

Trump’s Reputation

He assailed the prosecution case and their witnesses. Daniels had threatened to go public with her account of having sex with Trump in 2006, which was “almost an attempt to extort” him, Blanche said. Cohen, the DA’s star witness, is “obsessed” with Trump and will lie to see him convicted, he said.

“It was sinister, it was an attempt to embarrass President Trump,” the defence lawyer said. Trump bought the silence of Daniels, he said, to protect “his family, his reputation and his brand.”

Blanche said his “larger than life” client is a victim of overreaching prosecutors who put their faith in Daniels and Cohen, the former Trump fixer who went to prison for perjury and other crimes.

The basic events of the trial have been known since 2018, and more specifically since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump last year. But Colangelo revealed that the evidence includes insider accounts by Cohen and Pecker, emails, text messages, and recordings of Trump discussing the repayment, he said.

The crimes center around business records that Trump allegedly covered up in reimbursing $420,000 to Cohen, or more than twice what he paid Daniels to buy her silence, Colangelo said. After he was elected, Colangelo said, Trump falsely claimed the payments were for legal fees, he said.

Porn Star Payment

“They couldn’t say ‘reimbursement for porn star payment’ so they had to cook the books,” Colangelo said.

Jurors will hear Trump “working out the terms of the deal” on tape with Cohen, Colangelo said. “You will hear the defendant’s own voice in a recorded conversation.”

Their goal was to conceal damaging information ahead of the election and trash Trump’s opponents like Ted Cruz and Ben Carson with scurrilous stories. The Enquirer would “catch and kill” damaging stories, or buy unflattering articles with no intention of publishing them.

Pecker was called briefly as the prosecution’s first witness Monday, giving some basics about his role, and will return Tuesday. He said he had the final say over which stories were published in the Enquirer and which didn’t see the light of day.

“We used chequebook journalism and paid for the story,” he said.

Access Hollywood

Colangelo said the revelation in October 2016 of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about his conquest of women, had an “immediate and explosive” effect on the campaign. That meant he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Daniels, to prevent any further election surprises.

“The campaign was concerned,” the prosecutor said. “They knew it was damaging, not only because Trump bragged about sexual assault” but it was “in his own words, in his own voice.”

Bragg filed the first of four criminal indictments of the former president. What was unclear until Monday was how the former president would defend Bragg’s specific charges beyond attacking the DA and calling it an unfair witch hunt.

Trump, who wore a navy suit, white shirt and blue tie, seemed subdued and often jotted notes as Blanche took aim at Cohen, the witness who can most directly tie the payments to the election. Blanche recounted Cohen’s criminal record since leaving Trump, including his prison term for tax fraud and lying under oath to Congress.

“He raised his hand, swore to tell the truth and then lied, under oath,” Blanche said. As a podcaster and book author, Cohen is now obsessed with Trump, saying “his entire livelihood depends on this Trump obsession.”

Trusting such a man is a mistake, the defence lawyer said.

“You cannot make a decision on President Trump based on Michael Cohen,” Blanche said.

He also took shots at Daniels, whom he said profited greatly from her account of having sex with Trump in 2006 and still owes him $600,000 in legal judgments. He told jurors that her story doesn’t relate to the financial transactions made by Cohen that are at the heart of the case.

“Her testimony, while salacious, does not matter,” Blanche said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New York:

Donald Trump is the first former US president to face criminal trial, and on Monday his defense as well as New York prosecutors presented their opening arguments in the closely-watched case.

The trial is a watershed moment for the country, coming in the run up to November’s election — and it could feature several high-profile witnesses and explosive, salacious testimony.

Here are the key characters linked to the trial, which focuses on an alleged hush money payment to a porn star and Trump’s alleged business fraud as part of a plan to cover up those payments.

Donald Trump

Trump’s successful 2016 run for the White House is at the heart of the case.

Prosecutors allege that as he closed in on victory, he paid $130,000 to adult film actor Stormy Daniels to cover up a sexual encounter she claims Trump had with her in 2006.

That in itself may not have been a crime.

But prosecutors allege Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen then engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the payments, illicitly concealing the transactions as legal payments in the Trump Organization’s accounts.

Trump must be present throughout the trial, which will largely keep him off the campaign trail as he runs for the White House again.

Stormy Daniels

Daniels, an adult film star and director whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, says she and Trump met at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006.

She claims they went to Trump’s hotel room where they had sex, and the tycoon suggested she appear on his hit TV show, “The Apprentice.”

Trump denies this ever happened, setting up a possible clash between her and his attorneys as she is expected to testify.

Spurned insider Michael Cohen

Trump’s former personal lawyer, who never denied his “pitbull” moniker, has become a sworn enemy of the ex-president and will be the prosecution’s star witness.

Cohen paid the $130,000 to Daniels — at Trump’s request, he insists — and he has a federal conviction for doing so.

He is expected to lay out his former boss’s alleged involvement to the jury, but the defense on Monday portrayed him as a “criminal” convicted of making false statements to the US Congress who has “a desire to see president Trump go to jail.”

Prosecutor Alvin Bragg

A self-described “child of Harlem” who fell victim to heavy-handed New York Police Department tactics as a teen, Alvin Bragg went on to study at Harvard and in January 2022 became the first African-American Manhattan district attorney.

Elected on the Democratic ticket, he inherited the Trump case and was initially criticized for allegedly seeking to bury it — before indicting the former president.

Bragg also led the prosecution at the Trump Organization tax fraud trial, which resulted in the business group’s criminal conviction in 2022.

Judge Juan Merchan

Judge Juan Merchan is a respected magistrate in his 60s, the child of Colombian parents who moved with him to the United States.

He has a reputation among lawyers for being fair but firm.

The case is not being heard on Wednesdays as Merchan will attend to his duties on Manhattan’s Mental Health courts.

He has already drawn Trump’s ire, with the former president repeatedly attacking the judge for alleged bias.

Trump accused Merchan of being unable to assure a fair trial because his daughter worked for a campaign organization linked to Democrats.

That prompted Merchan to expand a gag order, in place to prevent Trump attacking jurors and court staff, to include his own family.

The lawyers

On Monday Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo presented the prosecution’s opening statements, bluntly describing “a criminal conspiracy and a coverup” and accusing Trump of lying about his business records.

Colangelo is a former US Justice Department official who has already locked horns with Trumpworld, having earlier led the New York attorney general’s civil inquiry into Trump.

Trump’s attorneys, Susan Necheles and Todd Blanche, are seasoned lawyers experienced in white-collar criminal law.

Blanche previously spent 10 years as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

In the defense’s opening statement Monday he declared Trump innocent, saying his client “had nothing to do with” any of the 34 counts against him.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

After Donald Trump lost a last-ditch bid to delay the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, he lashed out at the New York judge overseeing the case: Justice Juan Merchan.

“Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised,” Trump wrote on March 28 on his Truth Social platform. “If the Biased and Conflicted Judge is allowed to stay on this Sham “Case,” it will be another sad example of our Country becoming a Banana Republic.”

Despite Trump’s vitriol and efforts to get Merchan off the case, the judge has approached the proceedings with both concern for Trump’s rights as a defendant and presidential candidate, and firmness in the face of what he views as troubling behaviour and personal attacks on his family by the former US president.

The veteran judge, who began his career as an assistant district attorney in the same office that is now prosecuting Trump, has already overseen a criminal trial of Trump’s family real estate company and is presiding over onetime Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s criminal case.

At this trial, Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump a decade earlier. 

Trump, the Republican candidate for the presidency in the November 5 election, has pleaded not guilty and denies any such encounter. Judge Merchan has emphasized he does not want the trial to get in the way of Trump’s ability to campaign or to publicly criticize the case.

But he has held firm on enforcing rules in his courtroom, such as when he said during jury selection on Tuesday that Trump had been uttering something and gesturing in the direction of a prospective juror while she was being questioned just 12 feet (3.7 meters) away from him. “I won’t tolerate that,” Judge Merchan said after the prospective juror left the room, raising his voice. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom. I want to make that crystal clear.” The juror was not chosen.

In late March, Judge Merchan granted a request from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office for a gag order restricting Trump’s public statements about witnesses, court staff and individual prosecutors. The judge said some of Trump’s statements had been threatening or inflammatory.

The judge later expanded the order to cover his relatives and those of Bragg, whose office brought the charges, after Trump disparaged the judge’s daughter online. Trump’s lawyers have argued Judge Merchan should be removed from the case because of his daughter’s work for a political consulting firm with Democratic clients. Judge  Merchan has denied those requests twice. 

From Queens to Courtroom

The hush money case is the first of four criminal indictments Trump faces to reach trial. Trump has pleaded not guilty in the other cases as well, which are tied to efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his handling of government documents. 

The history-making trial is a far cry from Judge Merchan’s prior stints on the state’s Court of Claims, which hears cases against the state and its agencies, and family court in the Bronx. 

The judge was born in Colombia and moved to the United States at age 6, growing up in New York City’s borough of Queens – where Trump also spent much of his youth. He graduated from Baruch College in New York City and Hofstra University School of Law on Long Island.  He has been a Manhattan criminal court judge since 2009. Over the last three years, he has overseen several politically charged cases involving Trump and his allies.

Judge Merchan in 2022 presided over a criminal trial of the Trump Organization. The real estate company was convicted by a jury of tax fraud. Judge Merchan later sentenced the company to pay $1.6 million in fines.   He is also overseeing Steve Bannon’s case, which is currently scheduled for trial in May. The former Trump campaign and White House adviser has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges related to a nonprofit that raised funds for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump’s trial was initially slated to start on March 25, but Merchan delayed it by three weeks when defence lawyers raised concerns about the late production of potential evidence. After finding Trump’s arguments meritless, the judge has shown little patience for perceived postponement efforts.

In an April 3 order denying Trump’s bid to exclude some evidence, Judge Merchan wrote, “The fact that the Defendant waited until a mere 17 days prior to the scheduled trial date of March 25, 2024, to file the motion, raises real questions about the sincerity and actual purpose of the motion.”

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)