Judge to hold hearing over gag order
Léonie Chao-Fong
First off today, before we get to Pecker in the witness box, judge Merchan is likely to address whether Trump violated a court-imposed gag order with a series of social media posts about witnesses.
Prosecutors have accused Trump of violating the order 10 times since the start of the trial, and last week filed a motion to hold the former president in contempt of court, and to fine him $1,000 per violation.
Merchan subjected Trump to a gag order before the trial began, covering prosecutors (but not the Manhattan district attorney, Bragg), witnesses, court employees, jurors and their families. Before the trial, Merchan then extended the gag order to cover his own family and Bragg’s family, after Trump posted about Merchan’s daughter, who worked for a company that helped Democratic candidates with digital campaigns.
Trump remains free to criticize Merchan himself, though doing so would be unlikely to win any favors from the judge, who will decide Trump’s sentence should the jury find him guilty.
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Hush money was ‘election fraud pure and simple’, argued prosecutors during opening statements
Chris Michael
In his opening statements, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told an entertaining and damning tale.
In it, a presidential candidate tried criminally to cover up an alleged affair with an adult film star to keep damaging information away from the American public weeks before the 2016 election.
Specifically, Colangelo said, Trump’s campaign was terrified after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which revealed Trump on a hot mic bragging that he could sexually assault women because he was famous. His campaign spun that story as “locker room talk”, but should US voters hear about an affair with a porn star (and who said Trump’s behavior in the bedroom was unpleasant), that wouldn’t be “talk” – it would be action.
Colangelo said the effort to manipulate media began from the beginning of the campaign. He said Trump invited his friend and the former publisher of the National Enquirer, Pecker, to a meeting at Trump Tower in summer 2015. Trump had recently thrown his hat into the ring for the 2016 Republican nomination, and Colangelo said Trump, his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen and Pecker hatched a plan to keep damaging information about Trump out of the press.
According to the prosecution, Pecker agreed to run damaging information in the National Enquirer about opponents – including an item claiming, falsely, that Senator Ted Cruz had family connections to the JFK assassination.
Pecker would also buy up negative stories for the express purpose of preventing them from being published – a “catch-and-kill” campaign that Colangelo said was geared towards helping Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
He mentioned an earlier payment to Karen McDougal,