New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said Tuesday the city’s infamous Rikers Island jail will be “ready” for former President Trump if he is ordered to jail over violating a gag order in his criminal hush money trial.
Adams said the city’s Department of Corrections “is prepared for whatever comes on Rikers Island,” comparing the potential of holding an important person such as Trump to experience with movie producer and sex criminal Harvey Weinstein.
“We have to adjust, you know — in this business, particularly around law enforcement, we have to adjust whatever comes our way,” he said at a press conference Tuesday. “But we don’t want to deal with a hypothetical. They’re professionals, they’ll be ready.”
Trump has been found in violation of a gag order on his speech 10 times over two hearings in the ongoing trial, with Judge Juan Merchan threatening Trump with jail time if he continues to discuss details or make disparaging remarks about witnesses and other court figures in public comments.
The former president has already been fined $10,000 for the violations in the case, where he stands accused of falsifying business documents to cover up an alleged affair from a decade prior in the weeks before the 2016 election.
The judge told Trump on Monday that “last thing I want to do is put you in jail” but “at the end of the day, I have a job to do.”
“Your continued violations constitute a direct attack on the rule of law,” Merchan said.
Prosecutors said they do not seek to put Trump behind bars for the violations.
Trump has harshly criticized Merchan’s gag order and ones he’s received from the judges in his other cases, asserting they violate his First Amendment rights to respond to political attacks, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee becomes the first former U.S. president to face criminal trial.