DA in Trump’s ‘hush money’ case says relatives must be ‘off-limits’ after ex-president bashed judge’s daughter

Donald Trump should be barred from slamming family members of people involved in his “hush money” criminal case, Manhattan prosecutors said Monday — after the former president repeatedly bashed the progressive daughter of the judge overseeing the upcoming trial.

“This issue is not complicated. Family members of trial participants must be strictly off-limits,” wrote prosecutor Matthew Colangelo — who himself was the target of Trump vitriol as recently as last week — in a court filing.

“Defendant’s insistence to the contrary bespeaks a dangerous sense of entitlement to instigate fear and even physical harm to the loved ones of those he sees in the courtroom,” Colangelo added.

Trump, 77, has been hit with a gag order barring him from publicly bashing witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors.

The order also prevents him from ripping the family of “court staff,” but does not specify if that includes relatives of Judge Juan Merchan.

Soon after the order came down, Trump railed on his social media platform Truth Social about Merchan’s daughter, Democratic political consultant Loren Merchan — posting her photo to his 7 million followers.

Loren Merchan is president of Authentic Campaigns, a Chicago-based political consulting firm whose top clients include Trump foes like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was the lead prosecutor in the Republican’s first impeachment trial.

But Trump also claimed, without providing evidence, that Merchan’s daughter had posted a picture on her X account of him behind bars — which added fuel to his claim that the family was biased and that the judge “hates Trump.”

Publicly accessible records from the social media site formerly known as Twitter show that the account in question, while having the same username as an account Merchan’s daughter once used, was actually a brand new account that was made using her name in April 2023.

The new account “represents the reconstitution and manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned,” state court spokesman Al Baker said.

Trump’s lawyers, Susan Necheles and Todd Blanche, have argued that Trump has a constitutional right to rip the judge’s family as he so wishes.

Any attempt to stop him from doing so would “improperly restrict campaign advocacy by the presumptive
Republican nominee and leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election,” they said in their own filing Monday.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to felony counts of fudging business records to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels  — that silenced her story about an alleged affair that was set to come out on the eve of the 2016 presidential election.

He has repeatedly argued that the case led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat in a district that voted against Trump in landslides in 2016 and 2020, is politically motivated.

Trump has also frequently posted violent imagery on his social media platforms about people he believes are against him — including a photo of President Biden hog-tied and in the back of a truck.

He posted an image of himself last March holding a baseball bat next to Bragg’s head — threatening “death and destruction” if he was criminally charged in New York.

Last fall, he signal-boosted posts claiming that the son of Justice Arthur Engoron — who oversaw Trump’s New York civil fraud trial — had been given a prime seat to his civil fraud trial. But the bearded man tagged in photos as Engoron’s son was actually a reporter with the Post. Trump never deleted the posts.

His new round of social media attacks is designed to “intimidate witnesses and trial participants alike,” Colangelo wrote Monday.

“Defendant knows what he is doing, and everyone else does, too,” the prosecutor said.