Donald Trump Got Spanked, Gagged, And Fined In New York Court. Hell, Yeah, It Was HOT.

More please.

This afternoon, Donald Trump actually took the witness stand in the New York civil fraud trial taking place in Manhattan. It did not go well.

Now, before we all get excited, he was only up there for five minutes. And he wasn’t there to testify about all the criming that took place at his company. This was purely to explain to the court why he’s SUCH A FUCKING IDIOT who cannot STFU for five goddamn minutes.

To wit, Trump repeated attacks on Justice Arthur Engoron’s law clerk, after being ordered not once but twice not to do that. The first time was three weeks ago when he posted a photo of the clerk and falsely described her as Chuck Schumer’s “girlfriend.”

In court the next day, Justice Engoron furiously ordered him to cut that shit out.

“Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing, or speaking publicly about any members of my staff,” he declared from the bench after a conference in chambers where Trump’s lawyers promised that the post was down and their client wouldn’t do it again. And that was half true, at least for a couple days.

But last Thursday, the Meidas Touch guys noticed that, while Trump had indeed removed the post from Truth Social, it remained up at the mirror site at DonaldJTrump dot com which preserves his various bodily emanations for posterity. Justice Engoron threatened to throw Trump in jail, but wound up imposing a $5,000 fine and telling him not to do it again, AGAIN.

Then today Trump did this:

“This judge is a very partisan judge, with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is,” Trump babbled for the cameras outside the courtroom, in an extended rant on why he’d win if this case was before a jury.

The implication was unmistakable: Trump was once again attacking the law clerk, after being told in no uncertain terms not to do that.

"I am very protective of my staff, as I should be,” the Judge said this morning, according to Politico’s Erica Orden, adding, "I stated the last time that any future violations would be severely punished. Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal of a court order?"

Trump’s lawyer Chris Kise objected limply that Trump had been referring to Michael Cohen, who testified this morning. And after lunch, Trump himself tried to convince the court of it as well.

On the witness stand, the former president agreed that he had previously called the law clerk “unfair” and “very biased against us,” but insisted that he’d been referring to Michael Cohen in his remarks this morning. He did not explain why he would refer obliquely to Cohen, whom he just attacked last night on Truth Social, as “a person who is very partisan.” Nor did he explain what Michael Cohen had to do with the absence of a jury in this case.

Justice Engoron was not impressed.

“As you can see, my principal law clerk is very close to me,” Engoron said, noting that the witness stand is not alongside the judge’s bench, where the law clerk sits. “You and I see can see each other, we're close, but we're not as close, clearly. And there's a barrier between us.”

“As the trier of fact, I find that the witness is not credible, that he was referring to my law clerk, who is sitting much closer to me, who doesn’t have a barrier,” he ordered, according to the Daily Beast. “I hereby fine you $10,000, which is on the liberal side, to be paid within 30 days.”

Kise objected, calling it “a dangerous place to go,” but Justice Engoron was unmoved.

Once again, Donald Trump’s big mouth got him into trouble. And he lied on the witness stand. And meanwhile, his attorneys in DC are trying to get the appeals court to lift a gag order imposed by Judge Tanya Chutkan to stop him intimidating witnesses and court staff. The judge administratively stayed that order, giving prosecutors until this evening to respond, and then another three days for Trump’s lawyers to explain why their client doesn’t need to be muzzled.

And just in the past 24 hours, the world’s worst client has attacked Michael Cohen, Jack Smith, Mark Meadows, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Justice Arthur Engoron, and Justice Engoron’s law clerk, violating the New York gag order a second time.

Soooooo, yeahh, good luck with that appeal.

OPEN THREAD.

[Daily Beast]

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