Former President Donald Trump recently posted the following on Truth Social:
“Crooked Joe Biden told the DOJ to Indict TRUMP hoping that it would help him in his campaign against me and the Republicans. In other words, he indicted his Political Opponent. They are now called the Biden Indictments, and nothing like this has ever happened in the USA before!”
It took Judge Tanya S. Chutkan three rounds of written filings over the last six weeks and more than two hours of courtroom arguments this week to sort through the issues surrounding the gag order she imposed on former President Donald J. Trump.
It has been noted that the order left unanswered the hardest questions involved in gagging Mr. Trump. Judge Chutkan will still have to determine on a case-by-case basis which, if any, of the former president’s statements violate her ruling. And she will have to decide how to punish him if they do.
Mr. Trump’s legal team swiftly gave notice on Tuesday that he was appealing the order. Within hours of Judge Chutkan’s announcement at a hearing on Monday in Federal District Court in Washington that she would be imposing the order, Mr. Trump had already attacked it as an assault on his First Amendment rights.
Ms. Gaston’s initial answer was “yes” as she suggested that the order as proposed would bar Mr. Trump from lying about Mr. Biden’s role in the case. Mr. Trump, she told the judge, could not make any statements “falsely suggesting that President Biden directed this prosecution, which he did not.”
But when Judge Chutkan drilled down on the issue, Ms. Gaston seemed to give a different answer. This time, she said that if Mr. Trump asserted that Mr. Biden had directed the Justice Department to go after him, it would not be in violation of the order.
That was because “Joe Biden is not a party, witness, attorney, court personnel or potential juror” in the case, Ms. Gaston said, and so he would not be covered by the order.
Mr. Trump has often sought, without evidence, to portray Mr. Smith as acting at Mr. Biden’s direction by bringing the three conspiracy charges that sit at the heart of the case.
At one point on Monday, Molly Gaston, a prosecutor, appeared to give conflicting answers to a hypothetical question posed by Judge Chutkan: Would Mr. Trump be in violation of the gag order if he declared that “Crooked Joe Biden” had approved of or directed the indictment in the case as a way to interfere with the election next year?
