The New York judge in DJT's falsified business documents case changed the gag order. DJT is now allowed to publicly savage, slander, lie about and incite violence against witnesses and jurors in his case. If a juror or witness winds up dead, that blood will be on the hands of the judge, DJT and the murderer(s). The AP writes:
A Manhattan judge on Tuesday modified Donald Trump’s gag order, freeing the former president to comment publicly about witnesses and jurors in the hush money criminal trial that led to his felony conviction, but keeping others connected to the former president’s case off limits until he is sentenced July 11.
Judge Juan M. Merchan’s decision — just days before Trump’s debate Thursday with President Joe Biden — clears the presumptive Republican nominee to again go on the attack against his former lawyer Michael Cohen, porn actor Stormy Daniels and other witnesses. Trump was convicted in New York on May 30 of falsifying records to cover up a potential sex scandal, making him the first ex-president convicted of a crime.
In a five-page ruling Tuesday, Merchan wrote that the gag order was meant to “protect the integrity of the judicial proceedings” and that protections for witnesses and jurors no longer applied now that the trial has ended and the jury has been discharged.
Merchan says that abandoning jurors and witnesses to the enraged savagery of DJT and MAGA freaks is OK now that the trial is over. Yes, the proceedings involving jurors and witnesses is over. But the authoritarian attacks on the integrity of the rule of law and the judicial system continue unabated. That should have been sufficient to keep the gag order in place, but it was not.
IMHO, Merchan made a colossal mistake. It might get some innocent people killed.
Also my opinion, this exemplifies the most important weakness of democracies that revere free speech. Demagogues like DJT can and have killed various degrees and forms of democracy in their ruthless quest for wealth and power. Sometimes they kill innocent people along the way. Respect for free speech led Merchan to unleash the poisonous vitriol that drives DJT. Innocents in that trial must now bear the serious burden of Merchan's decision. Dark free speech is being used by authoritarian demagogues to destroy American democracy and the rule of law. There's not a damned thing we can do about it.
Killing inconvenient free speech
If DJT and his thug supporters ever establish the American authoritarianism they seek, one of the first casualties will be inconvenient but honest free speech. The main target to be silenced is criticism of the thug Republican autocrats in power and their corruption. The Chinese government did that and it still does. To varying extents, so do autocrats in Russia (Putin), Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Hungary, the Taliban in Afghanistan and now, to some extent, the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. Autocrats hate criticism and ban it when they can. Democracies cannot do that. Democracies that protect free speech are defenseless from powerful internal and external dark free speech assaults.
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