Legal scholars: Gagged Trump “playing with fire” in Truth Social posts targeting judge’s daughter

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday shared links to articles attacking the wife and daughter of the judge overseeing his Manhattan criminal hush-money case.

Trump posted links to posts from far-right activist Laura Loomer accusing the judge of bias because of his daughter’s consulting work on Democratic campaigns. Loomer also claimed that Judge Juan Merchan’s wife previously worked for New York Attorney General Letitia James, which has not been independently confirmed. Loomer’s posts also repeated that false claim that Merchan’s daughter posted an image of Trump behind bars that the New York state court system said came from a hoax account, according to Business Insider.

The posts came after Merchan expanded his gag order to bar Trump from publicly attacking his family members, accusing the former president of seeking to “inject fear” into the proceedings.

“Is this intentional interference with the administration of justice or the intact right to question a state actor’s impartiality?” questioned Georgia State Law Prof. Anthony Michael Kreis. “Someone is really playing with fire.”

Longtime Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Trump had effectively “dared” the judge to enforce the new gag order, urging Merchan to incorporate the gag order as a “binding condition of Trump’s pretrial release from jail.”