Trump Fined $1,000 for Gag Order Violation as Judge Warns of Possible Jail Time 

NEW YORK (AP) — The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial has fined him $1,000 for violating his gag order and sternly warned the former president that an additional violation could result in jail time.

The fine marks the second sanction for Trump for his comments about witnesses since the start of the trial last month. He was fined $9,000 last week for nine violations.

Judge Juan M. Merchan warned Monday that additional gag order violations could potentially result in jail time, though he said that was “the last thing I want to do.”

Prosecutors in Trump’s business-records trial are moving deeper into his orbit following an inside-the-room account about the former president’s reaction to a politically damaging recording that surfaced in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.

Hope Hicks, a former White House official and for years a top aide, is by far the closest Trump associate to have taken the witness stand in the Manhattan trial.

Her testimony Friday was designed to give jurors an insider’s view of a chaotic and pivotal stretch in the campaign, when a 2005 recording of Trump speaking vulgarly was made public and when he and his allies sought to prevent the release of other potentially embarrassing stories. That effort, prosecutors say, included payments to silence people with potentially damaging information on the presidential candidate.

“I had a good sense to believe this was going to be a massive story and that it was going to dominate the news cycle for the next several days,” Hicks said of the recording, first revealed in an October 2016 Washington Post story. “This was a damaging development.”

The trial enters its third week of testimony Monday with prosecutors building toward their star witness, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the payments. He is expected to undergo a bruising cross-examination from defense attorneys seeking to undermine his credibility with jurors.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with payments made to stifle potentially embarrassing stories. Prosecutors allege that those transactions were falsely logged in company records as legal expenses.

Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing.

The case is one of four Trump prosecutions and possibly the only one that will reach trial before the November election. Other felony indictments charge him with plotting to subvert the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and illegally hoarding classified documents after he left the White House.