Trump Courts Contempt Before New York Jury Is Even Impaneled

The world's worst client strikes again!

Donald Trump does not take advice from lawyers, and it has already cost him bigly. He’s staring down a half a billion dollars in fines and penalties from three civil cases, and he may not be able to post the reduced bond and avoid having his assets seized in the New York fraud case. He’s also confronting four pending criminal indictments after ignoring attorneys who advised him that attempting to overturn an election and refusing to give back stolen government documents were really stupid ideas.

Instead, Trump prioritized his political goals over legal strategy, with disastrous consequences for himself (and the country). And now, as he prepares to face a New York jury in the false business records case, he appears to be repeating the same mistake again, oblivious of the judicial buzzsaw he’s walking into.

Past Is Prologue

Since he left the White House, Trump has employed a rotating cast of attorneys, many of whom wound up testifying under oath before a grand jury. The only lawyer in the past three years who exerted any apparent client control was Joseph Tacopina, who represented Trump in the first E. Jean Carroll defamation case (Carroll I). Tacopina managed to limit the damages to just $5 million, and he did it by keeping Trump off the witness stand and far away from the jury.

For his pains, Tacopina was unceremoniously kicked to the curb on Truth Social, leaving Trump to be defended by Alina Habba in Carroll II. Habba is not in the business of client control, and she made no effort to restrain his constant attacks on the plaintiff. So Trump, whose political identity is equal parts vulgarity and aggression, repeated the exact same lies about Carroll which the first jury had called defamatory, even hurling abuse at her online as they sat there in the courtroom. His histrionics, wherein he sighed and snorted and stomped out during the plaintiff’s closing, can’t have impressed the jury either.

Trump was seemingly oblivious of the legal peril inherent in this gambit, and his lawyers were either unwilling or unable to make him understand it. And so, after conclusively demonstrating that a seven-figure slap on the wrist would not convince him to stop defaming Carroll, Trump found himself whacked with an $86 million verdict in the second case.

This pattern repeated itself in the civil fraud trial, where Habba led a claque of sycophantic JDs who clapped like trained seals at Trump’s every nasty utterance. Unable to stop their client from attacking Justice Arthur Engoron’s law clerk, the lawyers pivoted to attacking her themselves. They even howled to the appeals court that Trump had a First Amendment right to aim his rage cannon at a civil servant, as well as the judge’s wife and adult son. The court ordered Trump to cough up $450 million, citing his total lack of contrition and appalling behavior throughout the investigation and trial.

Similarly, in the election interference case, Trump’s lawyer John Lauro argued to Judge Tanya Chutkan that Trump had a constitutional right to attack Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wife on Truth Social:

Your Honor, what I'm saying is that it meets the boundaries of the First Amendment. I'm not saying whether or not it's appropriate from a lawyer's standpoint, okay? My views as an attorney may be widely different than my client's views as a candidate. But he is certainly entitled to describe why he believes this prosecution is politically motivated.

There’s no First Amendment right to attack witnesses or endanger civil servants, and the order imposed by Judge Chutkan was largely endorsed by the DC Circuit. Which meant that Justice Juan Merchan didn’t have to wonder if his gag order would pass constitutional muster in the New York criminal case; he could just copy Judge Chutkan’s paper and be done with it.

Karma’s a bitch!

Carroll II, Electric Boogaloo

As we gear up for the first Trump case, it’s worth asking whether this trial is more likely to go down like Carroll I, where Trump’s competent counsel protected him from doing himself major harm, or Carroll II, where his lawyers let him run his mouth and make matters so much worse.

So far, the answer appears to be the latter.

After Justice Merchan imposed the gag order protecting witnesses, jurors, line attorneys, and family members of the above, Trump pivoted to attacking the judge’s daughter, who works for a Democratic communications shop. When the court ordered him to knock that off, too, Trump took a few exploratory dips in the contempt pool by reposting articles about verboten topics, before screenshotting a Tweet from Stormy Daniels’s former lawyer criticizing Daniels and Michael Cohen.

"Thank you to Michael Avenatti—for revealing the truth about two sleaze bags who have, with their lies and misrepresentations, cost our Country dearly!" Trump added.

Trump followed up with posts implying that Daniels had lied about their liaison and calling Michael Cohen a “disgraced attorney and felon” — both clear violations of the ban on attacking witnesses with respect to their expected testimony.

On Monday morning the prosecutors announced in court that they would be seeking sanctions for contempt.

“Defendant's recent social media posts plainly violate the order because they target known witnesses concerning their participation in this criminal proceeding,” they wrote in a motion filed later that day. The DA requested that the court impose a $1,000 fine for each infraction, force him to take down the contemptuous posts, and “warn defendant that future violations can be punished with additional sanctions, including imprisonment.”

In court, Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche protested that his client was merely “responding to salacious, repeated, vehement attacks by these witnesses.”

"I don't recall that there's an exception if he's being attacked,” the judge replied acidly.

Later that day, Justice Merchan granted the prosecutors’ request for a hearing on April 24 to determine if Trump should be held in contempt. The caption alone was ominous:

WARNING: YOUR FAILURE TO APPEAR IN COURT MAY RESULT IN YOUR IMMEDIATE ARREST AND IMPRISONMENT FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT

Meanwhile in court — when he wasn’t napping! — Trump was doing his best to make himself obnoxious.

“I won’t tolerate that,” Merchan said at one point when Trump was heard muttering audibly about a potential juror. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom. I want to make that crystal clear.”

While he was still sitting at the defense table, Trump’s social media team sent out a press release announcing that he’d just stormed out in disgust. He followed that up with a blatant lie about being forced to miss his son Barron’s high school graduation next month.

In reality, Justice Merchan held off on ruling on the issue until he sees how the trial progresses.

And just last night, Trump continued to court contempt, posting a screenshot of an article attacking Cohen’s credibility.

If it wasn’t already clear that Trump was treating this as a political exercise, the Daily Beast got its hands on a memo being circulated by his campaign in which he urged Republicans to refer to the New York charges as “a bogus case,” “a weak case,” and “not a ‘hush money’ case.”

“The Biden Trial is a show trial in the truest sense of the term,” reads one script in the memo. “A six-week trial in the media capital of the world, where the only realistic consequence of a conviction is a talking point for the Biden campaign.”

That last bit may be a bit of wishful thinking. While the statutory punishment here is unlikely to include a custodial sentence, Trump may be found in contempt before his attorneys even get to deliver their opening statements. And while $1,000 per infraction is de minimus for a billionaire, there’s a lot of room to ramp up the penalties in a trial which is set to last six to eight weeks.

Trump still shows no sign of understanding that the cost of acting a fool in criminal court could be a whole lot worse than it was in the Carroll cases. And his lawyers show no inclination of stopping him before he finds out the hard way.

Like the man says, this is going to be a disaster.