An appeals court in Washington on Friday paused the gag order imposed on former President Donald J. Trump in the federal case accusing him of seeking to overturn the 2020 election, temporarily freeing him to go back to attacking the prosecutors and witnesses involved in the proceeding.
In a brief order, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the pause of about two weeks was needed to give it “sufficient opportunity” to decide whether to enact a longer freeze as the court considered the separate — and more important — issue of whether the gag order had been correctly imposed in the first place.
The panel’s ruling came in response to an emergency request to lift the order pending appeal that Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed on Thursday night. While the judges — all three of whom were appointed by Democrats — paused the gag order until at least Nov. 20 to permit additional papers to be filed, they wrote in their decision on Friday that the brief stay “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits” of Mr. Trump’s broader motion for a more sustained pause.
The gag order, which was put in place last month by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Federal District Court in Washington, has now been frozen, reinstated and frozen again. The protracted battle, with its back-and-forth filings and multiple reversals, has pitted two visions of Mr. Trump against each other….