OK, this morning, about two hours ago, it was frequent CNN legal correspondent Ellie Hoenig. If you listen to CNN in the mornings, you’ll hear from him several limes a week.
This morning, he’s addressing one of CNN’s morning anchors, Kate Bolduan. His comment quoted below starts at about 8:15 into the video linked above:
So, Kate, that’s an example of one way where Donald Trump could actually suffer a meaningful consequence of violating the gag order, because prosecutors as we’ve been discussing, they now allege that Donald Trump in his social media post has violated the gag order ten times. And it looks like they’re right in most are all of those allegations.
The problem though, is one of enforcement and discipline. All that the law allows the judge to do is either, A, impose fines, but under the New York law that the DA cited, only a maximum of $1,000 per incident. That’s not going to matter to Donald Trump. And then the other option is to lock him up, which I think is very unrealistic. And I just don’t think is realistically in play here.