Judge Finds Trump Violated Gag Order Again, Threatens Jail

The third week of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial started with a bang when the judge threatened to jail the former president, then took a methodical turn when prosecutors began walking the jury through the business records at the heart of their case.

Before jurors entered Monday, Justice Juan Merchan ruled Trump had violated his gag order for a 10th time and fined him $1,000 for claiming in an interview that the jury was mostly Democrats and that it was picked too quickly.

“Going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” Merchan said, looking directly at Trump, who was seated at the defense table. The judge said the last thing he wanted to do was jail a former and possibly next president, but that the violations were a direct attack on the rule of law. Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and has been juggling attending his trial in New York—which he is required to do—with campaigning for president.

The gag order bars Trump from attacking potential witnesses and jurors, in addition to prosecutors, court staffers and their families.

Two Trump Organization employees, former controller Jeff McConney and current accounts payable supervisor Deborah Tarasoff, took the stand to walk jurors through a series of company records that prosecutors have alleged constitute core evidence of the 34 felony charges Trump faces.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has alleged Trump directed the creation of false records—11 invoices, 12 general ledger entries and 11 checks—to cover up a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. During the trial, prosecutors have portrayed Trump as being at the center of a criminal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election by taking negative stories off the market, including Daniels’s allegation of an affair with Trump.

Bragg’s office will likely wrap up its case in about two weeks, a prosecutor told the judge Monday.

Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied the affair. He has accused Bragg, a Democrat, of being politically motivated.

A prosecutor walked McConney, who was involved in coordinating and tracking payments, through invoices and ledger entries.

Invoices, displayed on screens throughout the courtroom, referred to reimbursements due to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as a legal retainer. Prosecutors have alleged this is false, and that Cohen was reimbursed for paying off Daniels.

“Did you ever see a retainer agreement?” asked prosecutor Matthew Colangelo.

“I did not,” McConney replied.

McConney, who previously testified in the Trump Organization’s 2022 tax-fraud trial, has a rocky relationship with the prosecutors and the judge. At the tax-fraud trial, which led to the company’s conviction, Merchan declared McConney a hostile witness after finding his answers evasive.









Trump Organization’s Tarasoff, who works in accounting, testified about the reimbursement checks, some of which the Trump Organization sent by FedEx to Washington, D.C., during Trump’s presidency.

“We would send them to the White House for him to sign,” she told the jury. She said the money was later withdrawn from Trump’s personal account.

The Trump Organization is paying for both witnesses’ lawyers in the case. Throughout their testimony, Eric Trump, one of Trump’s sons, looked on from the courtroom gallery. When a 2017 check made out to Cohen appeared on the screen, Tarasoff identified the scribbled signature as belonging to Eric, an executive at the company.

While cross examining both witnesses, a Trump lawyer highlighted that neither employee had talked to the former president when creating or processing the records.

Throughout the day, some jurors’ attention flagged, with many looking down or around the courtroom. The panel last week had stared intently at former Trump aide Hope Hicks and former Daniels lawyer Keith Davidson, both of whom allowed prosecutors to build a narrative of Trump’s alleged efforts to take negative stories off the market in advance of the 2016 election.


Earlier in the day, the judge issued a decision on Trump’s gag-order violations and said that the financial penalties had no impact on the billionaire.

“Because this is now the 10th time that this court has found defendant in criminal contempt, spanning three separate motions, it is apparent that monetary fines have not, and will not, suffice to deter Defendant from violating this court’s lawful orders,” Merchan said in the ruling.

The judge has few tools at his disposal to get the former president to comply. The maximum fine allowed by law is $1,000 per violation. The judge could also jail Trump for a maximum of 30 days, although that could delay the trial and be logistically complicated.

Merchan said Trump violated the gag order in an April 22 media interview where he complained the judge was rushing the trial and that the jury pool was overwhelmingly Democratic.


“That jury was picked so fast—95% Democrats,” Trump said in the interview. “The area’s mostly all Democrat. You think of it as a—just a purely Democrat area. It’s a very unfair situation that I can tell you.”