Former President Donald Trump can no longer make remarks about court staff in his civil fraud trial in New York after an appeals court reinstated a narrow gag order in the case on Thursday.
The gag order, and a subsequent expansion of the order, forbids all parties and attorneys in the case from making public comments in and outside of court about Judge Arthur Engoron’s staff.
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Trump’s attorney Chris Kise said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner, “Tragic day for the rule of law.”
“In a country where the First Amendment is sacrosanct, President Trump may not even comment on why he thinks he cannot get a fair trial,” Kise said. “Hard to imagine a more unfair process and hard to believe this is happening in America.”
Trump had previously been fined $15,000 for violating the order on two occasions.
The order was initially issued in October after Trump disparaged Engoron’s principal law clerk on social media.
The former president posted a photo of the clerk, Allison Greenfield, and a link to her Instagram account, referring to her without evidence as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) girlfriend.
“Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful!” Trump wrote in the now-deleted post. “This case should be dismissed immediately!!”
Law clerks typically go unnoticed in trials, but Trump and his attorneys have repeatedly taken issue with Greenfield. They have criticized her past donations to Democratic politicians as a potential violation of ethics rules because they surpassed the donation threshold and have argued she has been “given unprecedented and inappropriate latitude” in the case.
Trump filed an appeal on the order and it was temporarily lifted two weeks ago, opening a window for Trump to target Greenfield again publicly.
Engoron has “used his Politically Biased & Corrupt Campaign Finance Violator, Chief Clerk Alison Greenfield, to sit by his side on the ‘Bench’ & tell him what to do,” Trump wrote last week on his social media platform Truth Social.
The appeal remains ongoing, and the reinstatement of the order came in the form of a denial to Trump’s motion for stay on enforcement of the order while his appeal is being considered.
The former president has not spoken on the gag order’s reinstatement directly, but soon after it was filed, he posted a string of posts on Truth Social about Engoron’s wife.
“This is the judge’s Wife and Family that are putting these things out. … This is the most unfair Trial in the History of New York, and I’ve had some pretty unfair Trials!” Trump wrote.
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Accompanying the post and subsequent posts were screenshots from an unverified X account that Trump claimed belonged to Engoron’s wife. The screenshots were of memes the account shared with graffiti saying “f*** Trump” and digitally altered photos of Trump in prison.
Engoron’s wife denied to Newsweek that the account belonged to her, saying she did not own an X account at all.
