Judge Holds Trump in Contempt Over Gag Order and Warns of Jail Time

The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan held him in contempt on Tuesday, fining the former president $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order and warning that he could go to to jail if he continued to attack witnesses and jurors.

“The court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said as Mr. Trump’s trial reconvened for a third week. He added that while he was “keenly aware of, and protective of, defendant’s First Amendment rights,” he would jail Mr. Trump “if necessary and appropriate.”

Justice Merchan determined that Mr. Trump had flouted the gag order by making nine public statements on social media and on his campaign website in which he attacked witnesses and the jury. He ordered Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, to remove the posts by Tuesday afternoon.

The judge’s ruling and admonition came one week after a fiery hearing in which prosecutors had argued that Mr. Trump’s statements threatened the trial.

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, claimed that the former president had not violated the order, but Justice Merchan chastised Mr. Blanche that day for failing to marshal facts or legal precedent in support of Mr. Trump, the first American president to face criminal prosecution. “You’ve presented nothing,” Justice Merchan scolded Mr. Blanche.

The ruling that ensued Tuesday marked a nadir in relations between the court and Mr. Trump, who stands accused of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star. Mr. Trump has been at the trial every day, though he has largely been relegated to the sidelines, complaining to cameras afterward about the gag order and the judge. But now, with the financial penalty — and the specter of jail time — his fury could reach a boiling point.

Already, prosecutors have alerted the judge to four new potential violations. Those were not covered by Justice Merchan’s Tuesday order and will be discussed at another hearing on Thursday morning.

The judge’s decision on Tuesday and his questioning at the hearing last week took aim at two of Mr. Trump’s regular tactics: his tendency to lie and his habit of suggesting that every action he takes is political, even when it concerns his criminal cases.

Justice Merchan rejected Mr. Blanche’s argument that Mr. Trump’s posts did not violate the gag order because they were responses to political attacks by adversaries who, by coincidence, happen to be potential witnesses.

“Merely characterizing every one of defendant’s postings as a response to a ‘political attack’ does not make them so,” the judge wrote.

One likely witness, Michael D. Cohen, is Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer. Mr. Cohen has slammed Mr. Trump on social media, though last week he vowed to “cease posting anything about Donald,” a decision he said he made “out of respect for Judge Merchan and the prosecutors.”

If Mr. Cohen breaks his silence, he may not be protected from Mr. Trump’s attacks: The judge, in his Tuesday order, appeared to warn witnesses that if they provoked Mr. Trump, the former president might be free to respond.

The gag order, Justice Merchan wrote, cannot “be used as a sword instead of a shield by potential witnesses.” In what appeared to be an oblique reference to Mr. Cohen, the judge added that he “may very well consider the propriety of continuing the limitation” on Mr. Trump’s speech “as it relates to certain individuals.”

The other witness Mr. Trump attacked, Stormy Daniels, is the porn star whom Mr. Cohen paid during the 2016 presidential campaign to stay silent about her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. The former president, who denies that he and Ms. Daniels had sex, is accused of falsifying 34 business records to cover up the payment.

In one post for which Mr. Trump was fined, he attacked Ms. Daniels on his website Truth Social, reposting a years-old statement in which she denied the affair. Mr. Trump added a comment falsely portraying the statement as newly discovered: “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND! WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT?”

Mr. Trump did not note that the original statement was from January 2018 or that Ms. Daniels had recanted it not long afterward, explaining that she had denied the sexual encounter because of a nondisclosure agreement.

During last week’s hearing, Justice Merchan focused on Mr. Trump’s lie about when the statement came to light.

“So that’s not true?” he asked Mr. Blanche.

“That’s not true,” Mr. Blanche conceded.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Justice Merchan agreed with prosecutors that the former president had crossed the line by attacking Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels, except in one post in which he appeared to call them “sleaze bags.” In a nod to Mr. Blanche’s argument that Mr. Trump can respond to political attacks, the judge found a “tenuous correlation” between Mr. Trump’s post and Mr. Cohen’s denunciation of the former president’s latest run for the White House.

Justice Merchan held Mr. Trump in contempt for the nine other statements that prosecutors flagged, including times when Mr. Trump reposted other people’s comments. If Mr. Trump selected a post to share with his followers, the judge held, “it is counterintuitive and indeed absurd” to not attribute the reposts to Mr. Trump.

In one instance, Mr. Trump had quoted a Fox News commentator, Jesse Watters, denigrating potential jurors in the case as “undercover liberal activists.”

A day after the post, one of the jurors begged off the panel.

Justice Merchan is not the first judge to rebuke the former president for breaking a gag order. The judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s civil fraud trial last year fined him $15,000 for assailing a law clerk.

Justice Merchan initially imposed the order on Mr. Trump in late March, barring him from making public statements about any witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or court staff, as well as their families. But within a week, Mr. Trump found a loophole and repeatedly attacked the judge’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant.

At the request of prosecutors, Justice Merchan then expanded the measure to cover his relatives and relatives of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Justice Merchan and Mr. Bragg are not covered by the order and Mr. Trump is free to attack them.

During the hearing last Tuesday, Christopher Conroy, a prosecutor, told Justice Merchan that Mr. Trump had broken the order “repeatedly, and hasn’t stopped.” Mr. Conroy added that the former president had made statements violating it even “right here in the hallway” outside the courtroom.

“He knows what he’s not allowed to do,” Mr. Conroy said of Mr. Trump, “and he does it anyhow.”

Mr. Blanche tried to counter that argument, telling the judge that Mr. Trump was doing everything he could to comply. Justice Merchan signaled that he thought that assertion was ridiculous, telling the lawyer, “You’re losing all credibility with the court.”