Hush money judge says Michael Cohen needs to stop talking about Trump

The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial in Manhattan has instructed prosecutors to tell Michael Cohen to stop talking about the case and the former president.

Mr Trump’s attorneys have repeatedly urged New York Justice Juan Merchan find a way to gag the former president’s one-time “fixer” turned sworn nemesis and shameless critic.

Cohen, who paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to silence her story about having sex with Mr Trump in 2006, is a key witness in the case against the former president. Mr Trump is accused of reimbursing his former attorney the $130,000 in a series of payments falsely lableled as “legal expenses.” He is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records and has pleaded not guilty.

Cohen is now expected to testify in the trial on Monday. He isone of two final witnesses for the prosecution in a trial stretching into a fourth week of testimony.

In court on Friday, defense attorney Todd Blanche told the judge that Mr Trump’s former lawyer is “becoming a real problem” throughout the trial.

Cohen “continues to speak publicly about this trial and President Trump,” including in a recent TikTok video “wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of President Trump behind bars” and “announcing that he’s running for Congress,” Mr Blanche told Judge Merchan.

Mr Blanche said he wants Cohen “prohibited from talking” about the case, just “like Trump is”.

“It’s becoming a problem every single day that president Trump is not allowed to respond to this witness, but this witness is allowed to continue to talk,” Mr Blanche said.

Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass dismissed the defence’s argument, arguing that prosecutors “have no control over what they do, and we have repeatedly, repeatedly, asked the witnesses to do that.”

“Not just Mr Cohen. All the witnesses,” he added. “If Mr Blanche is asking the court to order the people not to do something, we have already done that.”

The judge found a compromise: prosecutors should tell Cohen that the judge is telling him to be quiet.

“I will direct the People to communicate to Mr Cohen that the judge is asking him to refrain from making any more statements about Mr Trump or anything else related to this case,” Judge Merchan said. “That comes from the bench.”

While Cohen has now been asked to stop commenting on the case, Mr Trump continues to face a gag order that blocks him from publicly attacking trial witnesses, the jury, court staff and their families.

To date, the former president has been fined $10,000 for routinely violating this order through attacks on social media, links on his campaign website and comments in media interviews.

On Monday, while handing down a 10th penalty, Judge Merchan warned the former president that issuing $1,000 fines for each offense is not a strong enough deterrent – and that any future violations could result in jailtime.

“The magnitude of such a decision is not lost on me,” the judge told him. “But at the end of the day I have a job to do, and part of that job is to protect the dignity of the justice system.

“Your continued violations … threaten to interfere with the administration of justice, and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law.”

That warning came just days before Cohen’s anticipated testimony on Monday, following years of sparring between the former president and his former attorney on both social media and in person.

Several of Mr Trump’s gag order violations involved his apparent threats to Cohen, who previously testified against the former president in his civil fraud trial, where he compared Mr Trump to a “mob boss” who instructed him to grossly inflate the values of his net worth and assets.

Cohen has already pleaded guilty to crimes central to the hush money case in New York; in 2018, he agreed that he sent monthly invoices to Mr Trump as part of a “retainer agreement” that didn’t exist, and that “the monthly invoices [he] submitted were not in connection with any legal services he had provided in 2017” but for reimbursements for a hush money scheme with Ms Daniels.

Mr Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with that scheme in an alleged effort to hide politically damaging stories about his affairs to keep his chances of winning the 2016 election afloat.

In the trial’s opening statements, Mr Blanche claimed that payments to Cohen were merely “for legal services rendered.” The invoices were processed, “somebody at Trump Tower” signed off on them, and they were recorded as such in a ledger, he argued.

“What on earth is a crime? What is a crime about what I just described?” Mr Blanche said last month. “The 34 counts … are really just 34 pieces of paper.”

Those 34 counts include not just the checks but the ledger entries and invoices that created them.

Cohen submitted each invoice “pursuant to the retainer agreement,” according to documents shown in court. Pay stubs to Cohen described each check as payments for his “retainer.” Invoices entered into the company’s accounting software list each payment as a “legal expense.”

Ledgers from Mr Trump’s personal checking account and the Donald J Trump Revocable Trust – which handled the former president’s assets while he was in office – recorded the payments to Cohen as a “legal expense,” according court documents.