MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York appeals court has rejected Donald Trump’s challenge of Judge Arthur Engoron’s gag orders the day after his civil fraud trial came to a close.
In a four-page ruling from New York’s Appellate Division, First Department, judges Barbara Kapnick, Kelly O’Neil Levy, Peter Moulton and Saliann Scarpulla declined to overturn Engoron’s gag orders. The panel found that the “gravity of potential harm is small, given that the Gag Order is narrow, limited to prohibiting solely statements regarding the court’s staff.”
The court also denied Trump’s leave to appeal the gag orders to the state’s highest court in a second Thursday ruling from another First Department panel.
Engoron, the judge presiding over Trump’s civil fraud bench trial in Manhattan, imposed a gag order in October that barred Trump from attacking members of his staff after the former president shared a disparaging social media post about Engoron’s chief law clerk. The judge later issued an additional gag order that extended to counsel after Trump’s lawyers repeatedly complained about the same law clerk in open court.
Trump has twice violated the gag orders, resulting in fines totaling $15,000. Engoron claims that his office has been inundated with threats and harassment since the trial began, thanks to Trump’s initial attacks on the court’s staff.
Thursday’s rulings put an end to a winding saga that saw the gag orders paused by a state judge, then later reinstated. Despite the appellate court finding the orders to be narrow and limited, Trump cited them as the reason for his decision to pull out of his scheduled testimony earlier this week.
“I wanted to testify on Monday, despite the fact that I already testified successfully,” Trump said in a Tuesday post to Truth Social. “Anyway, the Judge, Arthur Engoron, put a GAG ORDER on me, even when I testify, totally taking away my constitutional right to defend myself.”
Trump challenged the gag orders by way of an Article 78 petition, which effectively sues Engoron for imposing them in the first place. The First Department found that this ultimately wasn’t an appropriate way to address the gag orders and implored Trump to take the proper steps to do so.
“The proper method of review would be to move to vacate the Contempt Orders, and then to take an appeal from the denial of those motions,” the panel found.
Trump’s lawyer Chris Kise told Courthouse News that these steps would have been pointless based on the time constraints of the trial. Kise had initially hoped to reverse the gag order before Trump would have taken the stand on Monday.
“We filed the petition because the ordinary appellate process is essentially pointless in this context as it cannot possibly be completed in time to reverse the ongoing harm,” Kise said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the decision denies President Trump the only path available to expedited relief and places his fundamental Constitutional rights in a procedural purgatory."
The gag orders only prohibit Trump from attacking members of Engoron’s staff; going after the attorney general and the judge himself is fair game. The former president has taken full advantage of that, berating both as biased, racist and Trump-hating in dozens of social media posts since the trial began in October.
The trial is currently on recess until Jan. 11, when defense and state lawyers will return to the New York Supreme Court to deliver closing arguments. New York Attorney General Letitia James brought the suit against Trump and his co-defendants last year, claiming that they fraudulently inflated annual financial statements in order to gain business advantages.
Engoron already found Trump and his co-defendants liable for the case’s top fraud count. His impending ruling will determine damages and the remaining counts at issue.
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