Trump threatened with jail time for ‘blatant’ violation of gag order

The judge in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial has threatened to throw the former president in jail for breaking the gag order in the case.

Back on 3 October, Judge Arthur Engoron imposed a gag order on Mr Trump after he made a post on his Truth Social site doxing and disparaging his law clerk.

Mr Trump was ordered to delete the post and was placed under a limited gag order over any future related posts or comments.

Under the order, the former president is banned from “posting, emailing or speaking publicly” about any members of the judge’s court staff.

While the former president complied by deleting the post from Truth Social, Meidas Touch reported that he kept a screen shot of the identical post up on his website – meaning he possibly violated the gag order.

The post was deleted from his website hours after Meidas Touch reported on the possible violation.

In court on Friday, the judge accused Mr Trump of “blatantly” breaking the gag order and threatened him with jail time.

“In the current overheated climate, incendiary comments can and in some cases already has, led to serious physical harm and worse. I will now allow the defendants to explain why this blatant violation of the gag order would not result in serious sanctions, including financial sanctions and/or possibly imprisoning him,” he said, per The Daily Beast.

The lawsuit, brought against the former president by New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleges that Mr Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and inflating his net worth on his financial statements.

Mr Trump says his assets were actually undervalued and maintains that disclaimers on his financial statements amounted to telling banks and other recipients not to accept his numbers but to check them out for themselves.

In a pretrial decision last month, Judge Engoron ruled that Mr Trump and his company committed years of fraud by exaggerating the value of his assets and net worth on his financial statements.

The judge ordered that a court-appointed receiver take control of some of Mr Trump’s companies, putting the future oversight of Trump Tower and other marquee properties in question.

An appeals court has since blocked enforcement of that aspect of the ruling for now.

The trial now concerns six remaining claims in the lawsuit, including allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.

Mr Trump, who is currently the front-runner in the Republican presidential primaries, is facing a number of criminal indictments, at both the federal level and in state cases in New York and Georgia.