Trump can’t control fraud trial death threats, lawyers argue

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Attorneys for Donald Trump claim “there is no indication” he can “exercise any control” over the flood of threatening messages from his supporters to his fraud trial judge and his chief clerk, subjected to near-daily attacks and insults from the former president.

Mr Trump’s lawyers are urging a New York appeals court to permanently reject a gag order against their client during a civil fraud trial with his brand-building real estate empire at stake.

But a filing from lawyers for Judge Arthur Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James last week argued that a gag order is necessary to protect the safety of the court’s staff, with a sworn statement from the court system’s top security official revealing that “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages” followed Mr Trump’s attacks.

In response on Monday, Mr Trump’s attorneys appeared to downplay such threats, claiming that the “sole cognizable justification” to gag the former president “is that an unknown third party may react in a hostile or offensive manner” to his speech.

“Since before the trial began and continuing thereafter, certain individuals, to whom there is no indication Petitioners have any connection or exercise any control, have engaged in behavior that Petitioners do not condone,” according to the filing from Mr Trump’s legal team.

“The communications themselves, while vile and reprehensible, do not constitute a clear and present danger of imminent harm as required under established precedent,” they wrote.

Transcriptions of threatening voicemails after Mr Trump first targeted Judge Engoron’s chief clerk fill more than 275 single-spaced pages, according to Charles Hollon, an officer-captain with the court’s Department of Public Safety assigned to a judicial threats unit.

The threats against them are “serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative,” he wrote.

A sample of messages left for the judge and clerk Allison Greenfield included homophobic and antisemitic attacks as well as explicit calls for violence against them.

“You should be executed,” one message reads.

“I mean, honestly, you should be assassinated,” reads another. “You should be killed.”

Another warns “I will come for you. I don’t care. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me either.”

The filing from Mr Trump’s attorneys, which spans more than 1,900 pages, argues that Mr Trump and his legal team “have never called for violence” nor “encouraged, or even condoned, the behavior” outlined in the affidavit.

But such comments “are not properly redressed by the wholesale suspension of [Mr Trump’s] First Amendment rights, especially where, as here, serious issues relating to partisan bias on the bench loom large,” according to his attorneys.

Judge Engoron imposed a gag order for all parties in the trial to prohibit disparaging remarks about his court staff, after Mr Trump’s posted about Ms Greenfield on his Truth Social account. He subsequently violated the order twice, incurring $15,000 in fines paid by his attorneys.

Earlier this month, Judge Engoron shot down what he called “unpersuasive” First Amendment arguments from Mr Trump’s attorneys against his gag orders, pointing to threats of political violence that have surrounded the former president’s criminal and civil cases since his first indictment earlier this year.

“The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far and away outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm,” he added.

After the gag order was paused, Mr Trump continued to berate the judge, the attorney general and the clerk on his Truth Social page.

A lawsuit from Ms James’s office accuses the former president, his two adult sons and chief business associates of grossly inflating his net worth and assets in financial statements given to banks and lenders to receive favourable financing terms.

Judge Engoron has already found the defendants liable for fraud.

The trial, now in its ninth week, could result in tens of millions of dollars in fines against the defendants.

Federal judges also are reviewing a gag order against Mr Trump in a case surrounding his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

During a hearing on Monday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel was skeptical of arguments from his legal team to overturn a gag order that blocks him from attacking witnesses and prosecutors in the criminal conspiracy case.

The judges appeared likely to narrow the scope of the order, in an attempt to balance First Amendment protections around political speech while addressing the wave of threats and harassment unleashed by Mr Trump and his supporters towards the prosecutors, judges, witnesses and prospective jurors involved with a growing number of cases against him.

A recent filing from US Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith’s team described that dynamic as “part of a pattern, stretching back years, in which people publicly targeted” by Mr Trump are “subject to harassment, threats, and intimidation.”

Mr Trump “seeks to use this well-known dynamic to his advantage,” the filing added, and “it has continued unabated as this case and other unrelated cases involving the defendant have progressed.”

When Mr Smith’s team updated their appeal to include news of the scale of threats in the New York case, attorneys for the former president called them “irrelevant” to the case.