Former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said on Saturday that Donald Trump‘s “luck may run out” over his repeated attacks on judges and court staff in his numerous ongoing court cases, adding that he could be jailed.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, faces various legal troubles with trials at both the state and federal level, and has been civilly sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James for $250 million. In addition, the former president has been indicted in four separate cases: two brought by Department of Justice‘s (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith, one by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and another from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has called the trials politically motivated.
However, Trump has continued to make repeated attacks on judges and court staff, often taking to Truth Social, his social media platform, to voice his stance, which has caused him to be issued gag orders.
In an interview with MSNBC on Saturday, Kirschner, a staunch Trump critic, spoke about the former president’s repeated attacks while explaining that the judges in Trump’s cases have a responsibility to pay attention to the ongoing “witness threatening conduct” Trump incites, warning that Trump’s “luck may run out.”
“I think it would be irresponsible for one jurisdiction to decline to pay attention to the potentially witness threatening conduct by the same pretrial defendant in another jurisdiction and we have seen some cross pollination between and among the judges. I can only wonder if at some point Donald Trump’s luck will run out and the judges will say enough, we are going to impose these gag orders, we are going to keep them in place.”
Kirschner added that the next step for the judges to decide is how to proceed with how to deal with the violation of these gag orders.
“The next question becomes how seriously do we deal with a violation of these gag orders. Do we consider the sanction of up to and including revoking him on release and putting him in pretrial detention,” he said.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump via email for comment.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted a court filing on Thanksgiving arguing that a gag order against the former president must remain while pointing to documents filed as part of the $250 million civil fraud trial in New York.
On Thursday, Cecil Vandevender, an assistant special counsel for the DOJ, notified the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals of a document which said that a gag order needs to be reinstated against Trump during the civil proceedings in New York, where James has accused the former president of fraudulently inflating the value of his properties in financial statements.
The government’s court filings pointed the appeals court to one section in particular, in which an employee at the New York State Unified Court System details the “hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages” which had been sent to Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the civil trial, as well as the judge’s law clerk Allison Greenfield. Engoron fined Trump twice in October for violating his gag order after he failed to remove a Truth Social post targeting Greenfield more than two weeks after the judge ordered it be deleted, and then a second time after the former president described Greenfield as a “very partisan” individual to reporters outside the courtroom.
Meanwhile, Judge Tanya Chutkan who is overseeing Trump’s federal case regarding his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, reimposed a narrow gag order last month that restricts what Trump can say about Smith’s team and potential witnesses in the case.
Chutkan had originally lifted the gag order to allow Trump’s lawyers time to prove why the former president’s comments should not be restricted ahead of the federal trial, which is scheduled to begin in March 2024. Trump and his lawyers have argued that any gag order against a presidential candidate is a violation of his First Amendment rights.
This is not the first time Trump has faced calls to be jailed due to his repeated attacks on judges and court staff as Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), called for him to be thrown in jail last week.
“It is enormously dangerous, I am shocked that we have allowed this to get this far. I’m just going to use my best analysis that I can give you at this point on this situation with Trump, and the attacks on the judges. Put his a** in jail. That’s how you end it. That’s how it stops,” Steele said during a Saturday episode of MSNBC’s Ayman.
He added: “People will be mad, they will be upset. But there is no other person on this planet, certainly not in this country, who would be given the kind of grace that Donald Trump has been given to run his mouth the way he has—attacking clerks, attacking judges, attacking the prosecutors personally; threatening them.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
