The judge presiding over the proceedings at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York again threatened the former US president on Monday with “incarceration” for having violated his ban on verbally attacking witnesses and jurors.
Judge Juan Merchan fined him another $1,000 “for violating his order by making public comments about the jury and how it was selected,” according to his written decision, and warned him that future offenses would be “punishable by incarceration”.
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Last week, the judge sentenced him to a $9,000 fine, or $1,000 per offense, for publicly attacking witnesses and jurors on the sidelines of his trial and threatening to send him to prison in the event of recidivism.
Since the start, on April 15, of this unprecedented trial for a former American president, prosecutors had requested that Donald Trump be sanctioned for his repeated violations of the ban on attacking key witnesses in the case.
At the Trump trial, account of a political “crisis” linked to his vulgar comments about women
These include his former lawyer Michael Cohen or the jurors, who he implies are not impartial.
The Republican candidate in the November election against the outgoing Democratic president faces conviction and, in theory, up to prison time in this case, one of four criminal proceedings in which he is charged.
He is being prosecuted for 34 falsifications of accounting documents which allegedly served to conceal the payment of $130,000 to former porn star Stormy Daniels in the home stretch of the 2016 presidential election, which he won narrowly against Hillary Clinton.
This sum was used to buy her silence about a fleeting sexual relationship that she claimed to have had with the real estate mogul in 2006, when he was already married to his current wife, Melania.
