In this courtroom sketch, Michael Cohen watches former US President Donald Trump as he is questioned by a lawyer from the attorney general’s office during the Trump Organization’s civil fraud trial in New State Supreme Court. York in the borough of Manhattan in New York City on October 24, 2023.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
Donald Trump targeted two likely witnesses in his upcoming gag trial in New York on Saturday, testing the limits of a gag order that bars such public statements.
“Mark POMERANTZ is being prosecuted for his terrible acts in and out of the DA’s office. Was disgraced lawyer and criminal Michael Cohen prosecuted for LYING?” the former president posted on Truth Social.
The social media post is the latest challenge to the limits of a gag order that bars Trump from making public statements about likely witnesses and jurors.
Cohen previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer and is likely to be a key witness in the trial. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to charges related to hush money payments to two women in 2016, which he said were made “at the direction” of an unnamed 2016 presidential candidate. He is expected to nominate Trump at the next trial.
Pomerantz is a former prosecutor who once led the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into Trump’s cash payments before resigning from the case in 2022.
The trial is expected to kick off jury selection on Monday, during which Trump will face 34 counts related to falsifying business records, allegedly to hide a $130,000 hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. The date start date was postponed from March 25th to begin jury selection. Trump’s legal team has time to review the new documents.
On March 26, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the case, imposed the initial gag order, which he later expanded after Trump continued to persecute Merchan’s daughter for her work with a Democratic political consulting firm.
In the weeks that followed, Trump repeatedly bet on the gag order’s limits.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump attacked Cohen and Daniels, another likely witness, as “two sleazebags.”
Trump has previously said it would be a “great honor” to go to prison for violating the gag order and compared himself to a “modern-day Nelson Mandela”, the former president of South Africa who spent decades in prison for opposed to apartheid.
It wouldn’t be the first time Trump has faced consequences for disobeying a gag order. In a separate trial in October, Judge Arthur Engoron fined Trump $10,000 for violating the gag order.