Former Prosecutor Slams Trump’s Lawyers, Accuses Them of ‘Misleading’ the Court to Block Gag Order

A former U.S. attorney slammed the counsels for the struggling former president Donald Trump, claiming they have been "misleading" amid their fight with the Department of Justice over Trump's repeated attacks against the NY judge and his courtroom staff.

A D.C. Appeals Court is scheduled to rule on a gag order imposed upon Donald Trump in the coming week. Trump has been the target of gag orders due to his persistent attacks on judges and court employees. He frequently expresses his opinions on Truth Social, his social media platform.

Judge Arthur Engoron, who is supervising Trump's civil fraud trial, placed a gag order on him that was temporarily removed last week by an appellate judge who expressed worries about free speech. The New York appeals court is likely to consider whether to reinstate the gag order. Speaking about Trump's constant assaults, McQuade said in an interview with MSNBC anchor Katie Phang that Trump's attorneys' arguments on the gag orders have examined examples outside of the legal system, which she considers to be "very misleading," per Raw Story. 

"There was a filing done in the New York AG civil fraud case appeal by the state, by New York state. It detailed thousands of horrible, violent, antisemitic messages that were being received by the law clerk as well as Judge [Arthur] Engoron," host Phang asked McQuade. "From an evidentiary perspective, does the Appeals Court take that into perspective what is going to hear oral arguments tomorrow?" she asked.

McQuade responded, "I think so, Katie. That is because it shows that it's not imaginative or speculative harm. These are real threats coming in every day and disrupting the business of the court, putting its employees in harm's way."

The former prosecutor replied by slamming the usage of opinion criminal cases, saying, "One of the things that the [Trump] lawyers have done, that is very misleading here, is to look at cases outside of the context of the court, of opinion criminal cases. You know, prior restraints are frowned upon of course. Anything that limits core political speech is antithetical to the First Amendment," McQuade said, Newsweek.

"That's not the world that we are in," she elaborated. "We are in the world of a trial. And so inside a trial to protect the parties, to protect court staff, and to protect the fair administration of justice, those rules are different. And so I hope that the court sees the light and understands the very threat on the one hand versus the restriction on the other."

This comes after the Department of Justice's (DOJ) court brief in which it makes the case that the former president should remain under a gag order. The appeals court was directed by the government's court papers to a specific portion where a New York State Unified Court System employee describes the "hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages" that Engoron and his law clerk Allison Greenfield had received. Hate speech and threats against Greenfield were incited by Trump's Truth Social post about her, and even after the judge ordered its removal, more than two weeks later, he did not take down the posts.