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Donald Trump is again in the news for the wrong reasons as he was fined $10,000 on Wednesday after the judge overseeing his civil fraud trial found that the former U.S. president violated a gag order in the case for a second time.
Justice Arthur Engoron last week fined Trump $5,000 after finding that he had not taken down a post disparaging the judge's law clerk. Engoron had earlier barred Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 U.S. election, from making comments attacking court staff.
According to Reuters, on Wednesday, during a break in the trial over a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James concerning Trump's business practices, Trump told reporters, "This judge is a very partisan judge, with a person who's very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is."
Engoron, surmising that Trump was referring to his clerk, called the comments a "blatant" violation of the gag order. The judge imposed the fine after Trump briefly took the witness stand to take questions.
Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said the "partisan" person Trump had been referring to was not Engoron's clerk but Michael Cohen, the former president's onetime lawyer and fixer who is testifying against him in the trial.
Engoron did not buy that argument and declined to reconsider the fine.
"The idea that that statement would refer to the witness, that doesn't make sense to me," Engoron said.
"Don't do it again or it will be worse."
When Engoron fined Trump last week, the judge warned that any future transgressions could bring "far more severe" sanctions including jail.
Earlier on Wednesday, Cohen acknowledged under questioning by an attorney for the former president that he has a financial incentive to criticize his ex-boss but defended his credibility as he testified in the trial.
Cohen, who came face-to-face with Trump for the first time in five years on Tuesday, underwent cross-examination during his second straight day of testimony in a case in which Trump's family business is accused of unlawfully manipulating its financials to dupe lenders and insurers.
Cohen testified in Manhattan on Tuesday that Trump "arbitrarily" inflated the value of the Trump Organization's real estate assets to secure favourable insurance premiums. Cohen said he doctored financial statements so the property values matched "whatever number Mr. Trump told us."