Trump's claim about hush money judge's daughter debunked in devastating fact-check

Former President Donald Trump attacked Judge Juan Merchan, the jurist overseeing his Manhattan hush money trial, by claiming that his daughter posted a picture of him behind bars on social media.

The problem, according to The Spectator's Jacqueline Sweet, is that that almost certainly didn't happen.

"The account’s veracity is dubious at best, with a creation date of April 2023. Analysis of the Twitter ID associated with the account shows that Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter Loren’s known Twitter account, that she has used since 2016, had its name changed and was set private at some point last spring," she wrote. "The same Twitter ID associated with Loren Merchan’s original Twitter account name, @LorenM426, is now attached to a new name, @LorenM0604, that has a profile picture of Loren Merchan, the same number of followers and posts as the account created in 2016, viewable in archives of the account. It is unclear who runs this account."

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"Why Merchan changed her user name and went private is also unknown, but it appears to have happened before April 4 last year, when a Breitbart article about her reported that her Twitter account appeared to be deleted, weeks after Judge Merchan was announced as the judge who would preside over what is now likely to be Trump’s first criminal trial next month," the report noted. "The account wasn’t deleted, however; it had changed user handles, according to the Twitter ID and the archived history of the account."

All of this comes as Merchan imposed a gag order on the former president — the latest in a series of such measures judges took against him in his legal proceedings.

The hush money trial, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, is the first of four criminal cases that will be heard, and the only one that appears definitively set to take place before the 2024 presidential election. Bragg is effectively prosecuting it as an election interference scheme, saying that the payments Trump made to adult film star Stormy Daniels were made to prevent voters from learning important knowledge about him ahead of the 2016 race.