Judge Chastises Trump For ‘Blatant Violation of the Gag Order’ on His Clerk, Raises Possible Penalties Including Fines or Jail

A Manhattan judge tore into former President Donald Trump on Friday for failing to delete a post attacking his clerk on his campaign page, weeks after the imposition of a gag order.

“I learned that the subject offending post was never removed from the donaldjtrump.com and in fact, has been on the website for the past 17 days,” New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron remarked from the bench, asking why Trump shouldn’t face “serious sanctions” for his "blatant violation of the gag order," such as fines or “possibly imprisoning him.”

Trump's attorney Christopher Kise described the development as an "inadvertent" result of the crossposting of his social media messages on his website.

Engoron had ordered Trump on Oct. 3 to delete his post on Truth Social circulating "untrue and personally identifying” information about his principal law clerk Allison Greenfield. 

Trump followed that directive, and he was hit with a limited order barring him from making any statements about the court’s staff. 

But the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner’s White House campaign left a mirroring message up until after a liberal political action committee called attention to it on Thursday afternoon. His campaign also sent out thousands of emails sending his supporters to the webpage smearing the clerk.

Meidas Touch flagged the webpage, which has since been deleted, as a potential violation of Engoron’s gag order. 

The Daily Beast reported that New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office alerted the judge to the campaign’s since-removed webpage, and in an article titled “Trump Is About to Be Ripped to Shreds by NYC Bank Fraud Trial Judge,” the news outlet quoted sources expecting Engoron to react strongly.

Those predictions bore out on Friday, at least rhetorically. Engoron gave Trump's defense team an opportunity to explain what happened, and the attorney general's office declined to make any statements in open court.

But the judge was clearly furious. The target of Trump's post, Greenfield, sat beside Engoron, who noted that in this "current overheated climate," messages like the one the former president posted could lead, and has led, to "serious physical harm and worse."

After Trump's lawyers provided their account of what transpired, Engoron and Greenfield whispered to each other and left the development on a cliffhanger. Engoron said he would take the matter "under advisement."

Later in the morning, Trump's lawyers provided context about the campaign website's reach. Trump's campaign sent emails to roughly 25,000 recipients, and an estimated 6,713 of those messages were opened, according to Kise.

Since the imposition of the gag order on Oct. 3, the campaign website kept the court-barred post up for 17 days until late on Thursday. During that time, the page had some 114 million total viewers, but only 3,701 unique views, Kise said. The latter number includes the email recipients who clicked through to the link.