Today his lawyers filed a response to the gag order and MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin wrote:
Trump’s team has filed its reply on the stay of the New York gag order. There is no response to, much less mention of, the court system’s documentation of the serious and extensive threats to Judge Engoron and his law clerk. https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=7vzJVI9/QEvXWmks3wQqTA==…
The sole new content concerns Engoron’s rapid rejection of Trump and the other defendants’ motion for a mistrial, despite the attorney general’s position that full briefing and argument would be helpful.
Team Trump’s implication is that the same unacceptable bias that drove Engoron to enter the gag order fueled his outright refusal to hear the mistrial motion.
So it’s another day and another grievance for Trump without even attempting to distance himself from or disclaim responsibility for the threat environment he created and then inflamed. Sound familiar?
It sure does. They aren’t even trying to make serious legal arguments in this case. This is now purely a political exercise.
Jack Smith brought up all these threats in New York in a filing in federal court on Thanksgiving regarding the gag order in DC. Presumably it was to bolster his argument that Trump’s words about people involved in these case can result in threats and intimidation by members of his cult. It included exhibits of hundreds of threatening, antisemitic and abusive texts and phone calls against those NY court personnel, particularly the clerk Trump personally targeted. As you can see by Trump’s thanksgiving post up at the top, he named her again the minute the gag order was stayed.
It will be interesting to see how all of this goes. There are many assurances from the legal beagles that the courts won’t be subject to such sophistry but I’m just going to wait to see how it unfolds. Things are going sideways far too often these days. (Also, I remember Bush v Gore….)