has lashed out at the New York judge who put him under a gag order ahead of his April 15 hush-money criminal trial, making a fallacious claim about his daughter and urging him to step aside from the case.
He said that Merchan, a veteran Manhattan jurist, was “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement” by Democratic rivals. The account on X, formerly known as Twitter, “is not linked to her email address, nor has she posted under that screenname since she deleted the account. Rather, it represents the reconstitution, last April, and manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned,” Baker said.
It does not bar comments about Merchan or his family, nor does it prohibit criticism of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the elected Democrat whose office is prosecuting Trump. Merchan said then that a state court ethics panel found that Loren Merchan's work had no bearing on his impartiality. The judge said in a ruling last September that he was certain of his “ability to be fair and impartial" and that Trump’s lawyers had “failed to demonstrate that there exists concrete, or even realistic reasons for recusal to be appropriate, much less required on these grounds.