In a surprising turn, Donald Trump took the stand in court Wednesday after the judge in his ongoing financial fraud trial determined he had violated a gag order — again.
Judge Arthur Engoron ordered that Trump pay a $10,000 fine for failing to adhere to rules the judge had previously set, in which he forbade Trump to make comments about court staff. The Associated Press reports that Trump went before cameras lined up in the courthouse hallway earlier on Wednesday, as he often has when attending the trial, and lambasted Engoron as “a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”
Engoron took Trump’s words to be a reference to his law clerk, whom Trump has targeted by name on social media in the past, sparking the creation of the gag order. When court reconvened, Engoron reportedly appeared upset, telling the former president, “I am very protective of my staff, as I should be. I don’t want anybody killed,” per Politico.
The judge asked Trump and his legal team to provide an explanation for his comments. “I stated the last time that any future violations would be severely punished,” Engoron said. “Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal of a court order?”
Trump’s attorney Christopher Kise argued that his client was referring to Michael Cohen, his former legal counsel who was on his second day of testifying in the case.
In a surprising turn, Engoron later ordered Trump to the witness stand to directly answer questions about the comments he made. When asked who his words were referring to, Trump said, “you and Cohen,” per the AP. But on the subject of Engoron’s clerk, Trump made no attempt to hide his feelings about her. “I think she’s very biased against us. I think we’ve made that clear,” he said.
In another dramatic moment, Trump would later storm out of the courtroom to the surprise of his lawyers, causing observers in the room to gasp. NBC News reports that the judge denied a motion for a directed verdict, which would end the trial, from his legal team in response to an aspect of Cohen’s testimony concerning whether Trump explicitly directed him to inflate his financial statements.
The gag order was put into place earlier this month following an inflammatory social-media post from Trump that targeted Engoron’s law clerk directly. On TruthSocial, Trump shared a photo from another user of the law clerk standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, suggesting a connection between the two. With the post, Trump described the clerk falsely as “Schumer’s girlfriend,” suggesting that the clerk has an agenda against him and that the case should be dismissed because of it.
As a result, Engoron ordered the post deleted from Trump’s profile and issued an order that barred all parties in the case from talking about members of his staff and court employees on social media. But when it was discovered that a version of the post was still visible on a campaign website of Trump’s, Engoron ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine and threatened the potential of further penalties if additional violations of the order occurred.
