“You don’t have to attack a judge if you’re confident in your case,” legal scholar says
Just weeks ahead of his Manhattan criminal trial, former President Donald Trump attacked the presiding judge’s daughter a second time this week on Wednesday, falsely claiming she used an image of him behind bars as a profile picture on social media.
That image “makes it completely impossible for me to get a fair trial,” Trump wrote on Truth Social before bemoaning the gag order Judge Juan Merchan imposed on him Tuesday and claiming it violated his First Amendment right to free speech.
But one problem, among others, is that Trump’s claim about Merchan’s daughter isn’t correct, according to the New York State Court system.
While the handle did previously belong to the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, she deleted it around a year ago, a court spokesman told The New York Times. An unknown user now owns the account, and its profile picture changed to a childhood portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of Trump’s Tuesday assail of the judge.
The former president’s latest social media griping came a day after Judge Merchan granted the district attorney’s request for a gag order on Trump, prohibiting him from going after witnesses, prosecutors, jurors and court staff. The order, however, does not cover the judge and his family, and the former president took full advantage of that by assailing Judge Merchan in another post demanding he remove himself from the case.
While Trump’s promotion of online hoaxes is far from new, his choice to levy the apparently false claims about the judge’s daughter weeks before trial marks an escalation on his part, the Times notes.
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