In this courtroom sketch, Michael Cohen looks toward former U.S. President Donald Trump as he is questioned by a lawyer from the attorney general’s office during the Trump Organization’s civil fraud trial in Supreme Court in New York State in the Manhattan borough of New York on October 1. 24, 2023.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Donald Trump targeted two likely witnesses at his upcoming secret trial in New York on Saturday, testing the limits of a silence order that prohibits such public statements.
“Was Mark POMERANTZ prosecuted for his terrible actions inside and outside the DA’s office. Was disgraced attorney and criminal Michael Cohen prosecuted for LIES?” the former president posted on Truth Social.
The social media post is the latest challenge to the boundaries of a silence order that bars Trump from making public statements about likely witnesses and jurors.
Cohen previously worked as Trump’s personal attorney and will likely be a key witness in the trial. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to charges related to hush money payments to two women in 2016, which he said were made “at the direction” of an unnamed 2016 presidential candidate. name Trump in the upcoming trial.
Pomerantz is a former prosecutor who led the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into Trump’s secret payments before stepping down from the case in 2022.
The trial is set to begin jury selection on Monday, where Trump will face 34 counts related to falsifying business records, allegedly to hide a secret $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. This date The start date was delayed from March 25 to give Trump’s legal team time to review new documents.
On March 26, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the case, imposed the initial silence, which he later expanded after Trump continued to attack Merchan’s daughter for her work at a Democratic political consulting firm.
In the weeks that followed, Trump repeatedly gambled on the limits of silence.
In an article published Wednesday by Truth Social, Trump attacked Cohen and Daniels, another likely witness, calling them “two sleazy bastards.”
Trump has previously said it would be a “great honor” to go to prison for violating the silence order and compared himself to a “modern-day Nelson Mandela,” the former president of South Africa who spent decades in prison for opposing apartheid.
This wouldn’t be the first time Trump faced consequences for disobeying a gag order. At another trial in October, Judge Arthur Engoron fined Trump $10,000 for violating the silence order.
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