Donald Trump is attending his civil fraud trial in New York City voluntarily, but he still ended up being ordered to the witness stand on Wednesday—and was fined $10,000. Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to testify under oath about a remark he made to reporters about a person seated next to the judge being "very partisan," NBC News reports. Trump claimed he had been talking about his former attorney Michael Cohen, who has been testifying against him, but Engoron called the claim "not credible." He fined the former president for a second violation of a limited gag order that prohibits him from commenting on court staff.
Engoron said it would be "very easy" for anyone to determine that Trump was referring to Linda Greenfield, his main law clerk, when he spoke about somebody "sitting alongside him," the Guardian reports. "There's a barrier between me and the witness stand," the judge noted. Trump was fined $5,000 on Friday for allowing a remark disparaging the clerk to remain on his website after the gag order was issued. "I am very protective of my staff," Engoron said Wednesday. "I don't want anyone to get killed." He rejected a request from Trump's lawyers to reconsider the fine, saying "Don't do it next time, or it'll be worse," reports the Washington Post.
The New York Times notes that this is the first time Trump has testified in open court in more than a decade—and since the judge immediately found against him, it could be a "harsh preview" of what to expect in his other trials. Cohen, who testified Tuesday that Trump had asked him to inflate the value of his assets to "arbitrary" numbers, was cross-examined by Trump's attorney's Wednesday and acknowledged that he had "animosity" toward his former boss, the AP reports. After he admitted that he had lied on previous occasions, Trump's lawyers made what the Post calls a "longshot request" to cut the trial short. Trump stormed out of the courtroom after the request was refused. (More Trump New York fraud trial stories.)
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