Donald J. Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday asked the judge who oversaw the former president’s criminal trial to lift a gag order on their client as the presidential campaign intensifies.
The lawyers said in a letter to the judge, Juan M. Merchan, that the end of the trial on Thursday nullified the need for the gag order, which bars the former president from attacking witnesses, the jury and others involved in the case.
Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, with a jury determining that he had falsified documents related to a hush-money payment his former fixer made to a porn star in 2016.
“Now that the trial is concluded, the concerns articulated by the government and the court do not justify continued restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump,” the lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, wrote in the letter.
The jury found that Mr. Trump had falsified the documents to conceal an unlawful conspiracy to aid his 2016 presidential campaign by suppressing potentially damaging information. Mr. Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in July and faces up to four years in prison.
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the case against Mr. Trump, declined to comment on the defense’s request.
Mr. Blanche and Mr. Bove argued that Mr. Trump had a “constitutional mandate for unrestrained campaign advocacy,” citing a debate with President Biden scheduled for later this month, and what they characterized as continued attacks from two prosecution witnesses: the porn star, Stormy Daniels, and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer.
Justice Merchan imposed the gag order in March, writing that it was necessary to limit the former president’s out-of-court statements given that his history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” comments posed a risk to orderly court proceedings.
During the seven-week trial, the judge found that Mr. Trump had violated the order 10 times, attacking jurors — who the former president said were “mostly all Democrat” — and witnesses, including Mr. Cohen. The judge fined Mr. Trump $10,000 and threatened to send him to jail if the violations continued.
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Asserting that jailing Mr. Trump was “the last thing” he wanted to do, the judge said in early May that it was his responsibility to “protect the dignity of the justice system.”
After Justice Merchan’s warning, Mr. Trump was not found to be in violation again. But he continued to attack the judge and the district attorney who brought the case, Alvin L. Bragg. Neither was shielded by the gag order.
It was not entirely clear whether the order remained in place once the jurors delivered their verdict — a court spokesman said last week that it “speaks for itself.”
