Donald J. Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday asked the judge who oversaw the former president’s criminal trial to lift a gag order on their client as the presidential campaign intensifies.
The lawyers said in a letter to the judge, Juan M. Merchan, that the end of the trial on Thursday nullified the need for the gag order, which bars the former president from attacking witnesses, the jury and others involved in the case.
Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, with a jury determining that he had falsified documents related to a hush-money payment his former fixer made to a porn star in 2016.
“Now that the trial is concluded, the concerns articulated by the government and the court do not justify continued restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump,” the lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, wrote in the letter.
The jury found that Mr. Trump had falsified the documents to conceal an unlawful conspiracy to aid his 2016 presidential campaign by suppressing potentially damaging information. Mr. Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in July and faces up to four years in prison.
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the case against Mr. Trump, declined to comment on the defense’s request.
Mr. Blanche and Mr. Bove argued that Mr. Trump had a “constitutional mandate for unrestrained campaign advocacy,” citing a debate with President Biden scheduled for later this month, and what they characterized as continued attacks from two prosecution witnesses: the porn star, Stormy Daniels, and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer.
Justice Merchan imposed the gag order in March, writing that it was necessary to limit the former president’s out-of-court statements given that his history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” comments posed a risk to orderly court proceedings.
During the seven-week trial, the judge found that Mr. Trump had violated the order 10 times, attacking jurors — who the former president said were “mostly all Democrat” — and witnesses, including Mr. Cohen. The judge fined Mr. Trump $10,000 and threatened to send him to jail if the violations continued.
Asserting that jailing Mr. Trump was “the last thing” he wanted to do, the judge said in early May that it was his responsibility to “protect the dignity of the justice system.”
After Justice Merchan’s warning, Mr. Trump was not found to be in violation again. But he continued to attack the judge and the district attorney who brought the case, Alvin L. Bragg. Neither was shielded by the gag order.
It was not entirely clear whether the order remained in place once the jurors delivered their verdict — a court spokesman said last week that it “speaks for itself.”
And while Mr. Trump seemed to believe himself bound by the order, he also appeared willing to test its limits.
He told reporters at a news conference at Trump Tower on Friday, “I’m under a gag order, nasty gag order” and lamented the fines that he had been forced to pay for violating it.
But at the same appearance, Mr. Trump also appeared to attack Mr. Cohen, who in crucial testimony said that his former boss had directed him to pay hush money to Ms. Daniels before his 2016 victory, and afterward had signed off on a plan to conceal the payoff by disguising reimbursements as payments for legal services.
“I’m not allowed to use his name because of the gag order. But you know, he’s a sleazebag,” Mr. Trump said Friday.
In an interview that aired Monday on “The Will Cain Show,” a Fox News podcast, Mr. Trump also criticized the makeup of the jury, saying the jurors were “you know, from a certain persuasion” and that winning “would have been hard to do, no matter what.”
Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly attacked the gag order as a violation of his right to free speech, particularly as he campaigns for president. On the trail, he has said that the order keeps him from being able to comment on the case against him — even as he often criticizes it and attacks the judge.
And even with the gag order in place, the Trump campaign has for months put the trial at the center of its fund-raising efforts, recently sending numerous emails to supporters using the verdict as a hook for donations.
In their letter, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Bove insisted that the order should never have been issued in the first place.
“The defense does not concede that there was ever a valid basis for the gag order and reserves the right to challenge the irreparable First Amendment harms cause by the order,” they wrote in their letter.
