Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is hoping to gag Donald J. Trump and the scandal-plagued former president’s legal team is not, happy about it, asserting that Americans have a “First Amendment right to hear President Trump’s uncensored voice.”
DA Bragg sought the gag order from Judge Juan Merchan in the infamous Manhattan Stormy Daniels hush-money criminal case against ex-President and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, warning that Donald’s history combined with his uninhibited public rhetoric about the case and the potential for his base of supporters to take those remarks as a green light for harassment ultimately poses a “significant and imminent threat to the orderly administration of this criminal proceeding.”
ABC News now reports that Trump’s legal team is raising 9 kinds of holy Hell over Bragg’s gag order request.
“With jury selection scheduled to begin in Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial in three weeks, the former president’s defense lawyers have asked Judge Juan Merchan to deny prosecutors’ recent request for a limited gag order, arguing the former president should be permitted to fully respond to attacks by his political opponents,” ABC reports.
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Trump’s defense lawyer Todd Blanche responded, “American voters have the First Amendment right to hear President Trump’s uncensored voice on all issues that relate to this case. President Trump’s political opponents have, and will continue to, attack him based on this case. The voters have the right to listen to President Trump’s unfettered responses to those attacks — not just one side of that debate.”
ABC notes that as soon as Bragg submitted his gag order request, the former president’s “defense lawyers described the gag order as a ‘heckler’s veto’ which fails to identify or substantiate which third parties might engage in threats or harassment. They also argued that Trump has complied with past gag orders, as well as the protective order imposed by Merchan in this criminal case.”
Bragg, of course, is well within his right to request a gag order in this case, given that Donald Trump has not only been subjected to necessary gags in his various other criminal and civil legal disputes over the last year, but has been fined on two separate occasions for violating those orders.
As it stands, Bragg’s infamous and highly-publicized hush-money case is slated to be the first of the former president’s four criminal cases to go to trial, after the Manhattan DA made history with the first criminal indictment against a former United States president.
Bragg and his team accuse Donald Trump of falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up a hush-money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of the now-former president’s efforts to conceal his extramarital affair with Daniels from American voters in the midst of the 2016 presidential election.
The sprawling case against Trump was kicked into high gear when longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who could have once been poised as a key witness to the former president’s defense, pleaded guilty to charges of perjury.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
