Photo: Justin Lane/Getty Images
Earlier this month, after Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts in his hush-money trial, Trump’s legal team filed a request to have the gag order that had been placed on him lifted. In a letter, his attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote that the trial’s end meant the government could no longer justify “restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump.”
In their initial response, Manhattan prosecutors argued against removing the gag order owing to a need to “protect the integrity of these proceedings” through the sentencing process. (Trump is due to be sentenced on July 11.) But Friday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office offered an additional rationale in a new filing to Judge Juan Merchan, citing increased threats against Alvin Bragg and other people connected to the case.
Bragg and his team stated their opposition to fully overturning the gag order, writing that it should remain partially in place for staffers for the court and the DA’s office as well as their families and jurors. Per their filing, threats against Bragg, his family, and his office staff grew from just one case in 2022 to 89 in 2023 and have continued at a high level since. In 2024, the NYPD Threat Assessment and Protection Unit logged 61 new “actionable threats” with 56 of them coming in during April, May, and June. That total doesn’t include the more than 500 threatening phone calls and emails received by the office since April.
Since his involvement in the case began, Bragg has been subjected to seemingly endless vitriol from Trump. The Daily News reported that the district attorney has received hundreds of hateful and racist messages since Trump was convicted, calling him the N-word and threatening his life. In one message received from Portland, Oregon, the sender posted a photo of Bragg’s face next to a noose with the words “I am past the point of just wanting them in prison.”
The memo detailed additional harrowing incidents, including a pair of bomb threats made on April 15, the first day of the trial. One post displayed the home address of a prosecutor from the DA’s office and another showed sniper sights on “people involved in this case or a family member of such a person.”
“Against this record from just the past several months, any expressive interest defendant purports to have in attacking DANY staff, their family members, or the Court’s family members remains overwhelmingly outweighed by a sufficiently serious risk of prejudice to this ongoing criminal proceeding,” the memo reads.
In a footnote, prosecutors raised the possibility that the gag order should remain in place even beyond sentencing, since staff from the DA’s office and the court itself will still be involved in the event of a likely appeal.
Prosecutors said the gag order should remain in place for jurors, even though they completed their work last month. Bragg’s office cited Trump’s “singular history of inflammatory and threatening public statements,” saying that it includes attacks on jurors in his other legal matters. They also pointed to recent attempts by Trump’s supporters to dox the jurors.
Bragg and his team did agree to let the gag-order provision around witnesses lapse since they’ve already testified, likely allowing Trump to go back to railing against his favorite subjects: former attorney Michael Cohen and adult-film star Stormy Daniels. However, they wrote that this change doesn’t give Trump “carte blanche” to continue his attacks, warning that he could be found liable for defamation and similar claims if warranted.
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