What gag order?
Donald Trump critics are leaning into the free advice former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer has for the former president in his criminal hush-money trial.
That’s because it basically amounts to this: Go ahead, break the court’s gag order.
“He needs to explain why he’s conflicted,” Fleischer said on Fox News, where he works as a contributor.
“He doesn’t explain how or why. He needs to say that the judge’s daughter works for a Democratic political consulting firm that does anti-Trump business. He needs to explain it, otherwise it’s just an assertion with no proof. And if the president, if he’s gonna say it, back it up,” he said.
When pressed by another host whether that violates the gag order, Fleischer doubled down.
”When the judge is conflicted you can still explain how and why and, I think, comply with the gag order,” he said.
“Hopefully Trump will continue to get his legal advice from Fox contributors,” Trump critic Ron Filipkowski quipped on X.
That’s because while Trump is allowed to talk about the judge, he’s not allowed to talk publicly about the judge’s family — including his daughter.
Trump has already been fined for violating the gag order 10 times and was threatened with jail time if he continued after the judge argued the maximum $1,000 fine wasn’t doing the trick.
What Fleischer, who isn’t an attorney, was referring to and what Trump has already suggested without evidence in a past social media post, is that Judge Juan M. Merchan was kowtowing to his daughter’s interests as a Democratic political consultant.
Trump claimed that Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, whose firm has worked on campaigns for President Joe Biden and other Democrats, had recently posted a photo on social media depicting her “obvious goal” of seeing him jailed.
In a statement, a spokesperson for New York’s state court system said that claim was false and that the social media account Trump was referencing no longer belongs to Loren Merchan. It appears to have been taken over by someone else after she deleted it about a year ago, court spokesperson Al Baker said.
The account on X, formerly known as Twitter, “is not linked to her email address, nor has she posted under that screenname since she deleted the account. Rather, it represents the reconstitution, last April, and manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned,” Baker said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.
