Richmond woman targeted in his defense

Wide enough from reach from New York City to Richmond, Virginia, where the daughter of the judge presiding over the trial lives.

Long before a New York jury convicted Trump on 34 counts on Thursday, Loren Merchan became a target for Trump and his defense team, who tried for more than a year to force her father, Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, to recuse himself from the case in part because of her work as an executive for a Chicago-based digital marketing firm that has worked for high-profile Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden.

After the verdict on Thursday, Trump addressed the media and said Merchan was “a conflicted judge who should have never been allowed to try this case. Never.”

In a statement he had posted on March 28 to the Truth Social media network he owns, Trump had called the judge “totally compromised” because his daughter is “a Rabid Trump Hater” whose marketing company, Authentic campaigns, works for Biden and other prominent Democrats who oppose the former president’s campaign for the presidency.

Trump contended that the firm’s clients have used the high-profile trial to raise political contributions for their campaigns, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who was the lead manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial and is now running for the U.S. Senate.

But the attacks have not worked — with the New York Advisory Committee on Ethics or with the judge.

The judge dismissed a motion last year seeking his recusal and then imposed a gag order on Trump this year that he then expanded to prohibit the former president from making disparaging public statements about the judge’s family or that of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor in the case. Trump filed notice that he would appeal the gag order to the New York Supreme Court.

Steve Benjamin, a prominent Richmond defense attorney, said before the verdict that the gag order does not violate the former president’s constitutional First Amendment right to free speech.

“Trump’s public attacks on court officials, witnesses and their families has never been acceptable or protected speech,” said Benjamin, who is past president of the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and special counsel to the Virginia Senate Courts of Justice Committee.

“The law distinguishes between lawful speech and speech that intends to intimidate,” he said.

Loren Merchan, whose father presided over her marriage two years ago in Chesterfield County, did not respond to requests for comment by phone, email and through Authentic campaigns’ website.

Her company has little history with political campaigns in Virginia. The Virginia Public Access Project shows that former Del. Hala Ayala, D-Prince William, paid the company about $26,000 for digital marketing and consulting in her unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor in 2021.

Trump’s legal defense team filed a motion with the New York Supreme Court on May 31, 2023, to seek the judge’s recusal from presiding over the case that prosecutors filed 14 months ago, alleging 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal $130,000 paid to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied having sex with Daniels.

By the time Trump filed the motion, Merchan had already sought guidance from the New York Advisory Committee on Ethics about whether his daughter’s work, among other things, precluded him from presiding over the former president’s criminal trial.

The advisory committee responded on May 4, 2023, with a three-page opinion that said “the matter currently before the judge does not involve either the judge’s relative or the relative’s business, whether directly or indirectly. They are not parties or likely witnesses in the matter, and none of the parties or counsel before the judge are clients of the business.”

“We see nothing in this inquiry to suggest that the outcome of the case could have any effect on the judge’s relative, the relative’s business, or any of their interests,” the opinion concluded.

The judge quoted from the opinion in his ruling last August that dismissed Trump’s motion for recusal. In the ruling, he confirmed that his daughter was the president and chief operating officer of Authentic campaigns, which he described as “a digital marketing agency that works with Democratic Party candidates as well as nonprofit organizations.”

He said Trump’s legal team “has failed to demonstrate that there exists concrete, or even realistic reasons for recusal to be appropriate, much less required on these grounds.”

The controversy did not end there, but returned to the public spotlight in late March, weeks before the trial began. Trump used his Truth Social platform to attack Loren Merchan for allegedly posting an image of the former president behind bars as her profile picture on X, formerly known as Twitter. However, court administrators said the image was bogus and had been posted on a Twitter account that Loren Merchan had deleted a year earlier.

Al Baker, spokesman for the New York Office of Court Administration, said in news accounts that the account “is not linked to her email address, nor has she posted under that screen name since she deleted the account.”

“Rather, it represents the reconstitution … and manipulation of an account she long ago abandoned,” Baker said.

Trump made the claim the day after the judge prohibited him from attacking witnesses, jurors, prosecutors and court staff. The order, issued on March 26, initially did not apply to the judge or his family. The former president immediately attacked the judge and his daughter on social media, according to news accounts.

Justice Merchan then expanded the gag order on April 1 to prohibit public statements about his or Bragg’s families.

“This pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose,” wrote the judge, referring to similar accusations that Trump made in other legal proceedings against him. “It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for defendant’s vitriol.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s presidential campaign, called the amended order unconstitutional and said it violated the former president’s right to engage in political speech, according to an account published in The New York Times.

“The voters of America have a fundamental right to hear the uncensored voice of the leading candidate for the highest office of the land,” Cheung said in the news story.

After an appeals court refused Trump’s request to override the restrictions, his legal team filed a notice of appeal to the New York Supreme Court.

Benjamin, the Richmond defense attorney, said the law does not protect Trump’s attacks on Loren Merchan.

“She is not a public figure,” he said.