Judge Arthur Engoron threatened this Friday to have Donald Trump arrested. The judge in charge of the civil fraud trial the former president is facing in New York claimed that he could have Trump put in prison for violating a gag order. Trump was required to delete a post in which he directly criticized Engoron’s clerk.
Specifically, NBC News reports, the judge demanded that Trump remove "an untrue and disparaging post" that Trump had made on Truth Social. Engoron claims that he had previously discussed the post with the former president: "I ordered him to remove the post immediately and he said he did take it down."
However, days later, the judge discovered that although Trump did remove Truth Social's post, it was still up on the Trump presidential campaign website, thus violating the gag order. Trump received a similar order from Judge Chutkan in early October:
Despite this order, last night I learned the offending post was never removed from a website. This is a blatant violation of the gag order. I made it clear [that] failure to comply will result in serious sanctions. Incendiary untruths can and have led to serious physical harm. I will now allow the defendant to explain why this should not end up with serious sanctions or I could possibly imprison him.
Trump's lawyer says this is a mistake
Donald Trump's lawyer, Chris Kise, assured in statements to ABC News that not removing Trump's comments from the presidential campaign website was not done intentionally, but rather was an "inadvertent" error.
The cause of this oversight, he explained, was due to a "very large (campaign) operation" where no one had realized that the former president's statement was still on his website:
Truth Social's post was removed when President Trump presented it to the court. There was no intention to evade or ignore the order but it was part of a very large (campaign) operation. Unfortunately, this is part of the process that is built into the structure of the campaign and they missed it.
