Prosecutors suggest Trump violated gag order by attacking judge’s daughter

Manhattan prosecutors asked the judge presiding in Donald Trump’s upcoming criminal trial on charges of covering up hush money to a porn star before the 2016 election to confirm that a recent gag order preventing the former president from making inflammatory comments extends to the judge’s family members.

The prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office suggested in a two-page letter on Friday that, as far as they were concerned, Trump had violated the gag order by attacking the judge’s daughter in a recent social media post and should be sanctioned for future violations.

Related: Trump appeals ruling letting Fani Willis stay on election interference case

“The court should warn defendant that his recent conduct is contumacious and direct him to immediately desist. If defendant continues to disregard such orders, he should face sanctions under judiciary law,” said the letter to New York supreme court justice Juan Merchan, referencing statutes for criminal contempt that include possible jail time.

At issue was a post Trump sent on Wednesday assailing the judge’s daughter on his Truth Social platform for supposedly using a photo of Trump behind bars as her profile picture for her X account. The photo “makes it completely impossible for me to get a fair trial”, Trump wrote.

The problem for Trump was that the account appears to be bogus. The handle for the X account did belong to the judge’s daughter, Lauren Merchan, but she has since deleted that account, a court spokesperson said. Someone else – it is unclear who – took over the handle and used the photo.

But Trump and his supporters have remained undeterred despite the formal denial. Trump’s surrogates have maintained that the account supposedly is still connected to the judge’s daughter in order to perpetuate claims that the entire family is partisan against the former president.

The fixation on the judge’s daughter appears to be spurred in part by the fact that she has worked as an executive at Authentic, a digital marketing agency that works with Democratic political candidates. Trump has previously tried, but failed, to have the judge removed over his daughter’s work.

Whether the judge will find that Trump violated the gag order is unclear.

The gag order against Trump in the hush-money case was entered on Tuesday, after Merchan rebuked the former president for making statements about the case he deemed “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” ahead of trial, scheduled to start on 15 April.

Under the order, Trump cannot make, or direct others to make, public statements about trial witnesses concerning their roles in the investigation and at trial, prosecutors other than the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg himself, and members of the court staff or the district attorney’s staff.

The order notably also barred Trump from assailing the family members of any counsel or staff member, if his comments were made with the intention to interfere with their work in the case, or with the knowledge that his comments were likely to interfere with their work.

But it was uncertain whether the judge considered himself as court staff, and therefore whether the prohibition on commenting on the family of court staff extended to his daughter. Trump’s lawyers contended in their own filing on Friday that they considered the judge’s family as fair game.

Merchan did not specify how he would enforce the order. Typically, judges impose escalating fines as punishment but, in extreme circumstances, can ultimately order a defendant to be jailed pre-trial if they are found to be in criminal contempt of the order.