A New York judge has issued a gag order barring Donald Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial. The order cites the former president’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases. Judge Juan M. Merchan’s decision echoes a gag order in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case. It comes a day after he rejected the defense’s push to delay the Manhattan trial until summer and ordered it to begin April 15. If the date holds, it will be the first criminal trial of a former president.
