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New York prosecutors are seeking a limited gag order barring former President Donald Trump from talking about witnesses and court staff members to "protect the integrity of this criminal proceeding" ahead of his trial next month on charges he falsified business records.

The "need for such protection is compelling," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said in a court filing Monday. Trump "has a long history of making public and inflammatory remarks about the participants in various judicial proceedings against him, including jurors, witnesses, lawyers, and court staff."

"Those remarks, as well as the inevitable reactions they incite from defendant’s followers and allies, pose a significant and imminent threat to the orderly administration of this criminal proceeding and a substantial likelihood of causing material prejudice," Bragg's office added.

Lawyers for Trump, meanwhile, filed a pretrial motion in which they asked the judge to bar testimony from three of the DA's key witnesses in the case — former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. The filing paints Cohen and Daniels as liars and says McDougal's testimony would be "unduly prejudicial."

he DA is seeking a "narrowly tailored order" barring Trump from "making or directing others to make public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses" in the case; talking about prosecutors in the case besides Bragg, members of the court's staff and the DA's staff and their relatives, concerning their potential participation in the investigation or in this criminal proceeding; and talking about "any prospective juror" or juror in the case.

It argues the order is necessary because Trump "has a longstanding and perhaps singular history of using social media, speeches, rallies, and other public statements to attack individuals that he considers to be adversaries, including 'courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters.'”

The New York judge presiding over former President Donald Trump's hush money case ruled Thursday that he'll use an anonymous jury when the case goes to trial this month.

While Trump and attorneys in the case will know the identities of the jurors, their names will be shielded from the press and the public, Judge Juan Merchan said in his order, citing "a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of juror(s)."

The judge said his order applies only to jurors' identities and addresses, and had been requested by prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's office and consented to by Trump's attorneys.

"To be clear, the parties have not requested, and this Court has not agreed, to close the Courtroom during jury selection or at any other time during the proceedings. Access to the courtroom by the public and the press will not be tempered in any way as a result of these protective measures," Merchan said.

He also granted a request by Trump's attorneys to "minimize potential prejudice" to their client by not notifying the jurors of the protective measures and giving "neutral explanations" if they ask about them.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a court filing Thursday that his office doesn't oppose Donald Trump's request to delay his hush money trial — only days before the former president was scheduled to face his first criminal trial while simultaneously running to return to the White House.

The surprise move comes after federal prosecutors began turning over tens of thousands of documents this month relating to their investigation and their prosecution in 2018 of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who is expected to be a key witness in the trial.

Bragg's filing said that "although the People are prepared to proceed to trial on March 25, we do not oppose an adjournment in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials."

He added that his office doesn't oppose delaying the start of the trial for 30 days. The judge first scheduled the March 25 trial date in May.

If the start date is ultimately pushed back, it will be yet another win for Trump, whose strategy across the four criminal indictments he faces has been to seek delays.

In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump accused the DA's office of having "illegally withheld thousands of pages of documents."

"[W]ow, people have never seen anything like this one," he wrote.

Trump had requested a 90-day delay in the trial after the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan provided 73,000 pages of discovery since March 4. Bragg said his office’s initial review of those documents “were largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case" except for 172 pages of witness statements.

He said the U.S. attorney's office produced about 31,000 pages of "additional records" to both prosecutors and Trump's lawyers Wednesday and "indicated that an additional production would follow by next week." A judge approved Trump’s request in mid-January to subpoena additional materials from federal prosecutors.

“The timing of the USAO’s productions is a result solely of defendant’s delay despite the People’s diligence,” Bragg said, noting his office had received a "subset" of materials from the U.S. attorney's office in June, and promptly turned what they had over to Trump's lawyers.

"Despite having access to those materials since June, defendant raised no concerns to the People about the sufficiency of our efforts to obtain materials from the USAO before last week; instead, defendant waited until January 18, 2024, to subpoena additional material," Bragg's filing said.

Trump's attorneys blamed Bragg for the delay.

The People should have obtained and produced these materials long ago, and instead they chose to seek unsuccessfully to obstruct our access to them," they told the judge in a March 8 filing that was made public Thursday.

They've asked the judge to sanction the DA's office for not having gotten the material earlier, accusing prosecutors of "improper and unethical actions" and of having "engaged in widespread misconduct as part of a desperate effort to improve their position at the potential trial on the false and unsupported charges in the Indictment."

They also characterized the newly turned-over evidence as being far more relevant than the DA claimed, saying the documents include "exculpatory evidence" for their client and information that could be used to impeach Cohen's credibility.

The evidence relates to Cohen's 2018 guilty plea to numerous criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, lying to Congress about his boss' business dealings with Russia and failing to report millions of dollars in income.

The secret payments to women are at the heart of the DA's case, which alleges Trump falsified business records related to Cohen's $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. In court filings relating to Cohen's plea, federal prosecutors alleged Cohen paid the women off “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump, who was named at the time only as "Individual-1."

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, framed Bragg’s filing as “conceding serious discovery violations.”

“We will continue to fight to end this Hoax,” Cheung said in his statement.

In mid-February, Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, scheduled the trial to begin March 25. He said he expected it would last about six weeks.

The judge presiding over Donald Trump's hush money case on Monday scheduled the trial to begin on April 15.

The ruling by Judge Juan Merchan came after the former president's attorneys had asked for a lengthy delay or for the falsifying business records charges against their client to be dismissed because of evidence that was turned over just this past month by federal prosecutors.

“This is a witch hunt. This is a hoax,” a grim-looking Trump said on his way into the courtroom before the hearing.

Merchan had postponed the trial, originally scheduled to begin Monday, until at least mid-April after federal prosecutors belatedly turned over mounds of evidence related to a key witness in the case, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

While hearing arguments from both sides on who was to blame for the late production of evidence, Merchan blasted Trump's team suggesting the DA was responsible for federal prosecutors having not turned over the evidence earlier. “You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct” while they had no control over their federal counterparts, the judge said.

He also said Trump's lawyers could have asked for the information earlier.

“It’s odd that we’re even here, and that we’ve taken this time,” Merchan said, before calling a 45-minute recess.

Trump looked angry as he exited the courtroom during the break.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the falsifying business records charges against the former president, said he supported a 30-day delay in the proceedings in response to Trump’s request for a postponement in order to review documents that federal prosecutors had turned over relating to their prosecution of former longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

Bragg’s office, however, warned Merchan against delaying the trial further, saying that it should proceed April 15 because fewer than 300 of more than 170,000 documents turned over by federal prosecutors are potentially relevant to Trump’s criminal defense.

Trump’s lawyers have pointed fingers at the district attorney's office for failing to obtain the records sooner and asked Merchan to toss out the charges. The DA’s office decried the arguments by Trump’s counsel as a “red herring.”

Merchan tried to press Trump's lawyer to provide a firm number of documents that still need to be reviewed. Blanche pushed back on the DA's position that only 300 documents were relevant and said they're still looking through Cohen's emails, bank records and interview notes. "We got the materials a week ago. We're still going through them," Blanche said, as his client appeared to listen intently.

The judge also pressed the DA's office on the Trump team's claim they had been trying to "suppress" evidence.

”We were not trying to obscure anything,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told the judge.

In a bad sign for Trump, the judge said before the break that he and Trump's attorneys appeared to be interpreting things differently. Merchan said Trump's attorneys were characterizing the DA's office as not having done anything in terms of obtaining information while he interpreted what prosecutors have done as going "above and beyond" what the needed to do.

The New York judge overseeing former President Trump’s hush money trial imposed a gag order on Trump on Tuesday, preventing him from publicly attacking witnesses, jurors and others during what is slated to be the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president.

Judge Juan Merchan’s order still enables Trump to publicly attack the judge and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D).

But it prevents the former president from making public statements about witnesses, other prosecutors, court staff and their family members “if those statements are made with the intent to materially interfere with” the case.

“The uncontested record reflecting the Defendant’s prior extrajudicial statements establishes a sufficient risk to the administration of justice,” Merchan wrote in his four-page ruling.

Tuesday’s gag order was issued weeks before Trump’s trial is scheduled to begin on April 15.

The judge presiding over Donald Trump's impending New York criminal trial expanded a partial gag order Monday night following the former president's online attacks against his daughter.

Judge Juan Merchan said that Trump is barred from attacking his family members and those of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, in addition to the witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and their relatives who he was directed to "refrain" from talking about in a previous gag order issued last week.

Trump's "pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are 'fair game' for Defendant's vitriol," Merchan said on Monday. "It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. The threat is very real."

Trump's actions, he wrote, could have a chilling effect on a case that's just two weeks from the trial start date.

"The average observer must now, after hearing Defendant's recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well. Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself," Merchan wrote.

Former White House communications director Hope Hicks is expected to be a witness for the prosecution when the falsifying business records case against Donald Trump goes to trial in New York this month, a source with direct knowledge of the situation told NBC News on Monday.

Hicks met for several hours last year with the Manhattan prosecutors who brought the case. They allege that the former president falsified records relating to a hush money payment his then-lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign.

At that time, Hicks was Trump’s campaign press secretary. Her possible testimony at the criminal trial, which is scheduled to begin April 15, was first reported by The New York Times.

An attorney for Hicks said in 2019 that she'd been unaware of the hush money payment until it became public. But an FBI agent who'd been investigating Cohen said in an affidavit for Cohen's federal criminal case that he believed Hicks was involved in the negotiations aimed at preventing Daniels from going public with her claim that she'd had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied sleeping with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

The affidavit noted that the negotiations began in earnest after Trump's campaign was reeling from the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape on Oct. 7, 2016. In that video from 2005, Trump could be heard saying in a hot mic moment that he can grope women without their consent because "when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."

“I have learned that in the days following the Access Hollywood video, Cohen exchanged a series of calls, text messages and emails with Keith Davidson, who was then Clifford's attorney, David Pecker and Dylan Howard of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, Trump, and Hope Hicks, who was then press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign,” the FBI agent wrote in the affidavit.

Based on the timing of these calls, and the content of the text messages and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story," the affidavit said.

Court records indicate Hicks called Cohen at 7:20 p.m. on Oct. 8, 2016 — the first time she had called him in weeks — and that Trump joined the call seconds later. The conversation lasted four minutes. Hicks and Cohen spoke privately after Trump left the call and, after that, Cohen phoned Pecker, the president of AMI, according to court records.

Moments after that conversation ended, Cohen received a phone call from Howard, the chief content officer at AMI, the court records indicated. Cohen then called Hicks and spoke again with Pecker. At 8:03 p.m., according to the unsealed federal court documents, Cohen called Trump. They spoke for eight minutes.

The court records also have Trump and Cohen speaking twice on Oct. 26, the day Cohen wired $130,000 to an escrow account that would eventually be sent to Daniels’ attorney as payment for an agreement to secure her silence.

Hicks told the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee in 2019 that she was not involved with the hush money discussions, and she told the FBI that she did not "to the best of her recollection" become aware of Daniels' allegations until early November 2016.

After the Democratic chair of the committee questioned the "apparent inconsistencies" in Hicks' testimony following the 2019 unsealing of the FBI affidavit, Hicks' lawyer Robert Trout said in a statement, “Reports claiming that Ms. Hicks was involved in conversations about ‘hush-money’ payments on Oct. 8, 2016, or knew that payments were being discussed, are simply wrong.”

“Ms. Hicks stands by her truthful testimony that she first became aware of this issue in early November 2016, as the result of press inquiries," the attorney said.

Yeah I can't explain it either. I guess Americans really are turning into corrupt fascists.

Duh

Where's that "niceness" I hear Canadians are so famous for?

Oh, I could have been mean.. but decided to be nice and concise instead.

Meh, in reality I'm pretty sure that "Nice Canadians" are just as big a myth as "Southern Hospitality". I mean I lived in the deep south my whole life and I am very aware at this point that my people are anything but "hospitable". I can imagine it's the same sort of thing with Canadians.