Former President Donald Trump will take the stand in his own defense next month in his $250 million civil fraud trial, his attorneys said in court Monday.
Trump will be the defense’s last witness, on Dec. 11, his attorney Chris Kise said. In the week preceding the former president’s testimony, his son Eric Trump is scheduled to take the stand Dec. 6, Kise added. Both have already testified in the case as witnesses for New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office, who’s suing the Trumps and their company alleging they inflated financial statements to the tune of billions of dollars.
Separately, Trump’s attorneys told a New York state appeals court Monday that he’s not responsible for what court officials have called a “deluge” of threats against the law clerk of the judge presiding over the civil fraud trial. They also dismissed the assertion in a court filing last week that Trump has endangered the clerk’s safety.
The “purported security concerns lack good faith and substance,” and “the communications themselves, while vile and reprehensible, do not constitute a clear and present danger of imminent harm,” Trump’s lawyers argued in a filing to the state Appellate Division, urging it to leave in place a pause of Judge Arthur Engoron’s gag order barring Trump and his attorneys from publicly discussing the clerk.
In last week’s filing, lawyers for the state court system urged the appeals court to end a temporary pause on the gag order, arguing that ever since Trump posted about the clerk on social media last month, she has been subjected to “hundreds of threatening, harassing, disparaging and antisemitic messages,” including on her personal cellphone and email. A court security official, Charles Hollon, submitted a sworn affirmation saying that some of the threats against the judge and the clerk “are considered to be serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative” and that they led to increased security.
Trump’s attorneys said that their client had no involvement with the threats and that he shouldn’t be prohibited from airing his belief that the clerk is biased against him.
“The Constitution does not permit Justice Engoron to curtail [Trump’s] speech simply because people may react to things that President Trump says,” they wrote.
The state Office of Court Administration, on behalf of Engoron, argued differently in its filing. “The First Amendment does not prohibit courts from limiting speech that threatens the safety of the court’s staff,” its lawyer Lisa Evans wrote.
In a statement Monday, Kise said the gag order “seeks to shield the Court from the scrutiny essential to maintaining public confidence in the judiciary and the rule of law. So, it is beyond outrageous that an unconstitutional gag order could prevent the frontrunning presidential candidate from speaking about obvious, public, and partisan conduct which has denied him a fair trial.”
The state attorney general’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on Trump’s filing.
Engoron issued the gag order on the second day of the trial after Trump posted a picture of the clerk posing with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and baselessly claimed that she had a romantic relationship with him, an allegation Schumer’s office has called “ridiculous, absurd, and false.” The picture was taken at a political event while the clerk was running for a judgeship, and it had originally been posted on her campaign’s Instagram page.
“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I won’t tolerate it,” Engoron said after he found out about Trump’s social media post and comments he made to reporters about the clerk.
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In their filing Monday, Trump’s lawyers called it “manufactured outrage,” because the clerk “herself initially posted the very same photograph on a public Instagram account explicitly linked to her judicial campaign, with her name in the handle.” The clerk made the page private after Trump’s post appeared on Truth Social.
After the gag order was imposed, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly complained about the clerk in court, saying she’d been showing bias by rolling her eyes and whispering to the judge while they were questioning witnesses. They also took issue with her physical proximity to Engoron and said she appears to be acting as a “co-judge,” an allegation that Engoron has repeatedly — and angrily — denied.
Engoron expanded his gag order to include the lawyers this month and said he will “continue to consult with my staff, as is my unfettered right, throughout the remainder of the trial.”
Trump’s lawyers countered that Engoron “feels compelled to repeatedly justify his abnormal practices and assure the public that he, not his law clerk, is fulfilling his judicial duties, underscores the bizarre and deeply problematic nature of his practices. There is simply no room in the judicial system for openly partisan individuals to participate at all in the decision-making process.”
They also contended that the clerk’s “heightened public role” in the case, including allowing herself to be photographed in court sitting by the judge, “renders her a public figure, subject to public criticism, for purposes of the proceeding.”
The “purported security concerns are disingenuous given the Principal Law Clerk’s voluntary public, partisan posts and political activities and her insistence in remaining as a constant and unprecedented presence on the bench, allowing herself to be filmed and then viewed by an audience of millions since the underlying, extraordinarily high-profile trial commenced,” the lawyers argued.
It’s unclear when the appeals court will rule on the gag order.
During Monday’s court proceedings, Trump’s attorneys moved to call as a witness Barbara Jones, the retired federal judge whom Engoron appointed as a monitor of financial activity at the Trump Organization. Engoron rejected the request, which came weeks after Trump’s team began presenting their case. Engoron called the request “untimely” and “inappropriate.”
“I’m not aware of a single instance where a litigant asks to examine an independent monitor,” he said.
The witness who was on the stand Monday, Trump Organization executive Mark Hawthorn, testified that he had a good relationship with Jones and her team and that they seemed satisfied with how the company is being run. “There were concerns they highlighted that required more, and we responded diligently and adequately, but I would say no one from that team communicated to us that they uncovered any fraud or irregularities,” Hawthorn said.
On cross-examination, Hawthorn was asked whether he was aware that Jones had reported to the judge that some of the information she’d gotten from the company was “incomplete” and that the company had “also not consistently provided all required annual and quarterly certifications attesting to the accuracy of certain financial statements.” He replied, “Yes.”
