Trump's appeal of gag order is 'going nowhere': legal expert

Donald Trump was partially gagged in federal court on Monday after spending the better part of the past months attacking anyone associated with the case around his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and assorted civil cases.

Judge Tanya Chutkan this week ordered that Trump is not allowed to attack witnesses, lawyers, and their families publicly, leading him to protest his First Amendment rights were being violated.

Appearing on MSNBC Monday night, legal experts Andrew Weissmann, Neal Katyal, and Roger Parloff walked through the surprising lack of law around gag orders and threats.

Parloff noted that the reason that there are so few cases that deal with gag orders is that those being prosecuted generally want to be on their best behavior. Two recent cases in which there has been a gag order fought come from Trump World: Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, Weissmann explained.

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"Donald Trump says he's going to appeal," host Lawrence O'Donnell said.

"Heh, that's going nowhere," snickered Katyal. "Roger is right, no criminal defendant in their right mind would act the way Donald Trump did. I mean, the crazy part of this situation is not that a judge issued a gag order against the leading presidential candidate. The crazy part is that a leading presidential candidate has made a habit of threatening and attacking witnesses and prosecutors and court officials. That's the story. And Donald Trump is incapable of doing anything else. That's why I think it's like a coin flip, whether Trump is gonna violate this gag order first, or whether the House is going to elect a new Speaker first."

He said that he knows the lawyers will try to appeal it, but "the fact is, no other criminal defendant — and Judge Chutkan is absolutely right — can even get away with this. And she's allowing him to get away with that here. And the gag order — it simply tells Trump to behave. But he has a modicum of decency, which is probably why it will be so hard to follow that."

O'Donnell said that reading through the transcript it's clear Chutkan believes no other defendant would have been allowed to go this far and Trump is getting special treatment that no one else gets.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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