Former President Donald Trump once again attacked the writer E. Jean Carroll and suggested his political enemies could soon face jail time in a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday night.
Trump called in to the conservative network Newsmax, just days after a Manhattan jury found him guilty on all 34 counts in his hush money trial. Jurors agreed he had falsified business records to cover up allegations of an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11 and legal experts have wondered whether his repeated violations of a gag order in the case will weigh on the judge’s punishment. Trump appeared to violate the terms of that order — which bars him from making any public comments about the jury, and hasn’t yet been lifted — once more in the Newsmax interview.
He went on to address his recent, false claims that he never called for his onetime Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to be locked up.
“I said, ’Wouldn’t it really be bad? … wouldn’t it be terrible to throw the president’s wife and the former secretary of state … put the president’s wife into jail?” Trump said Newsmax.
“But they want to do it,” he went on, appearing to speak about his political opponents. “You know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to. And it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”
Trump continued to lambast his recent verdict and spoke about the other cases currently filed against him before discussing the dual defamation verdicts levied against him by Carroll.
“I’ve never met this woman, I don’t know this woman,” Trump said Monday, statements that are similar to those at the center of the cases filed against him. “And I’m supposed to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a fictional story.”
Carroll sued Trump twice and won. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing her at a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and defaming her afterwards, awarding the writer $5 million in damages. Carroll sued again for defamation after his repeated attacks against her. The jury in that case awarded her $83.3 million in damages after her attorneys argued he needed to be penalized with an amount large enough to make him stop.
The former president has posted a mammoth bond while he appeals the second case.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, has said Trump’s ongoing attacks could be the basis for yet another defamation suit in the future. She recently told the New York Times that “all options are on the table” moving forward.
