Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial judge has threatened to hold the former president in contempt, raising the possibility of fining or even jailing him because a disparaging social media post about a key court employee remained visible for weeks on his campaign website after the judge had ordered it deleted.
Judge Arthur Engoron said the website’s retention of the post was a “blatant violation” of his October 3 order requiring Trump to immediately delete the offending message.
The limited gagging order, hours after Trump made the post on the trial’s second day, also barred him and others involved in the case from personal attacks on members of the judge’s judicial staff.
Judge Engoron did not immediately rule on potentially sanctioning Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but noted that “in this current overheated climate” incendiary posts can and have led to harm.
Trump, who returned to the trial on Tuesday and Wednesday after attending the first three days, was not in court on Friday.
During his appearance this week, he reserved his enmity for Judge Engoron and New York attorney general Letitia James, whose fraud lawsuit is being decided at the civil trial. Neither are covered by the judge’s gagging order.
Trump lawyer Christopher Kise blamed the “very large machine” of the Republican’s presidential campaign for allowing a version of his deleted social media post to remain on his website, calling it an unintentional oversight.
The post was removed from the website late on Thursday after the judge flagged it to Trump’s lawyers.
But Judge Engoron said the buck ultimately stops with Trump, even if it was someone on his campaign who failed to remove the offending post.
“I’ll take this under advisement,” the judge said after Mr Kise explained the mechanics of how Trump’s post remained online. “But I want to be clear that Donald Trump is still responsible for the large machine even if it’s a large machine.”
Judge Engoron issued a limited gagging order on October 3 barring all participants in the case not to smear court personnel after Trump publicly maligned his principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, in what the judge deemed a ”disparaging, untrue and personally identifying” Truth Social post.
The judge ordered Trump to delete the post, which he did, and warned of “serious sanctions” for violations.
The post included a photo of Ms Greenfield posing with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer at a public event. With it, Trump wrote that it was “disgraceful” that she was working with Judge Engoron on the case.
Before Trump deleted the post from his Truth Social platform, his campaign copied the message into an email blast to supporters, which was automatically archived on Trump’s website, Mr Kise said.
The email was sent to about 25,800 recipients on the campaign’s media list and opened by about 6,700, Mr Kise told Judge Engoron after obtaining the statistics at the morning break.
In all, only 3,700 people viewed the post on Trump’s campaign website, the lawyer added.
“What happened appears truly inadvertent,” the lawyer said, pleading ignorance over the technological complexities involved in amplifying his client’s social media posts and public statements, calling the archiving “an unfortunate part of the campaign process”.
“President Trump has not made any statements of any kind about court staff, has abided by the order completely, but it appears no one also took down the… link that is in the campaign website in the back pages,” Mr Kise said.
New York law allows judges to impose fines or imprisonment as punishment for contempt. Last year, Judge Engoron held Trump in contempt and fined him 110,000 dollars for being slow to respond to a subpoena in the investigation that led to the lawsuit.
Ms James’s lawsuit accuses Trump and his company of duping banks and insurers by giving them heavily inflated statements of his net worth and asset values.
Judge Engoron has already ruled that Trump and his company committed fraud, but the trial involves remaining claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.
