Former President Donald Trump was fined again for violating his gag order during his real estate trial in New York.
Late last month, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay $5,000 within the next 10 days to the New York Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection.
“Make no mistake: future violations, whether intentional or unintentional, will subject the violator to far more severe sanctions,” Engoron said in the court filing. “(These) may include, but are not limited to, steeper financial penalties, holding Donald Trump in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him pursuant to New York Judiciary Law.”
The judge issued a gag order against the 45th president on October 3 after he insulted Engoron’s principal law clerk in a Truth Social post. The order forbids “all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff.”
The offending post has since been removed, but the judge complained in his filing that it remained on a Trump 2024 campaign website for 17 days, until the court asked recently that it be taken down.
Engoron said that the former president’s lawyers told him that the violation of the gag order was “inadvertent.”
“Giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt, he still violated the gag order,” the judge said. “In the current overheated climate, incendiary untruths can, and in same cases already have, led to serious physical harm, and worse.”
The fine came during Trump’s real estate trial. He was also present when the trial began earlier last month, and his annoyance similarly dictated the proceedings.
Engoron, on the other hand, has been relentless in cracking down on the former commander-in-chief. The judge recently issued a directive preventing Trump from moving his assets without prior notification to a court-appointed monitor.
The order requires Trump and his co-defendants to reveal all entities they possess and to provide prior notice of “any anticipated transfer of assets or liabilities to any other entities.”
The judge drew criticism when he mugged for television cameras and shrugged in front of the courtroom audience during the first of Trump’s real estate appeal trials. Some claimed that Engoron’s gesture indicated that he already saw the result as inevitable.