'Good luck with that': Legal expert says Trump has no chance to overturn gag order
The gag won't give.
All the legal hocus pokus by former President Donald Trump's legal team to unmuzzle their client and appeals of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan's gag order are going to be futile, a legal expert says.
"With respect to Trump's appealed to the D.C. circuit — good luck with that," Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general said during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell." "I don't think he has a chance in the world in winning that appeal."
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He continued to explain that the only one to blame for having a Gucci loafer stuck in his mouth is the 45th president himself.
"He may win something marginal around the edges, but before Judge Chutkan, who wrote the initial gag order opinion, before she ruled, during the time she ruled, after the time she ruled — I tell you, no one has made a more compelling case for the need for the gag order than a guy named Donald Trump."
Judge Tanya Chutkan oversees the 2020 election federal case that Trump was charged with over the summer.
He stands accused of coordinating an effort to stymie the transfer of power after then President-Elect Joe Biden was declared the victor.
Trump along with six unindicted, unnamed co-conspirators are being blamed for fanning unrest by proclaiming there was rampant "fraud in the election and that [Trump] had actually won."
The rhetoric and efforts led to the an attack on the Capital back on Jan. 6, 202.
Trump continues to deny any culpability in the case.
The original gag order remains under appeal.
But Judge Tanya Chutkan had paused it while deciding whether or to make it a permanent pause.
In a filing last week, special counsel Jack Smith explained that pausing the gag order is a dangerous move as he already railed against his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who took a guilty plea granting him immunity in the subversion case against him in Georgia.
Then Chutkan then reinstituted the gag order.
Katyal suspects that Chutkan is keeping tabs on what is happening in Georgia and that it only harms Trump's attempts to free him from the mandatory silence.
"It's absolutely the case that the judge in D.C. is going to take cognizance of what's going on in Georgia," he said. "They are going to even look probably at this threat... because a threat like what happened in Georgia doesn't happen in a vacuum."
On Monday, Trump disputed Chutkan's ruling on Truth Social, saying the gag order "unconstitutionally takes away" his First Amendment rights.
"I have just learned that the very Biased, Trump Hating Judge in D.C., who should have RECUSED herself due to her blatant and open loathing of your favorite President, ME, has reimposed a GAG ORDER which will put me at a disadvantage against my prosecutorial and political opponents," Trump posted.
Katyal is further convinced that the more Trump acts up with the same types of rhetoric and shots in public — it will backfire against his supposed strategy to delay the trial at all costs before November 2024.
"I think Judge Chutkan has a more limited option, which she has already talked about in the earlier hearings, which is, 'Look, Trump, if you keep saying the kind of stuff you're doing and scaring witnesses and attacking prosecutors, the result is going to be, I'm going to move the court date up.'"
"And she's absolutely within her rights to do that and would never be the subject of a viable appeal for Trump," he added.