- On Tuesday, Trump “explained” cancelling Monday’s planned testimony at his NY fraud trial.
- He said he “wanted” to testify, but that a gag order took away “my right to defend myself.”
- The gag only bars statements about the judge’s legal staff and hadn’t stopped his prior testimony.
A day after Donald Trump was set to testify, for a second time, at his New York civil fraud trial, he has now “explained” his last-minute decision to cancel.
He’d “wanted” to testify, he posted on Truth Social, hours before the defense rested it case Tuesday afternoon. But the judge’s gag order “totally” took away “my constitutional right to defend myself,” he said.
Like many of Trump’s statements about the trial, including pretty much everything he said to reporters outside the courtroom doors on Thursday, a point-by-point fact check is in order.
Here is Trump’s original post:
Let’s take a closer look.
“I wanted to testify on Monday, despite the fact that I already testified successfully…”
Trump’s lawyers indeed gave every indication that Trump had wanted to testify Monday, right up until the moment on Sunday afternoon when he publicly cancelled.
But was his prior testimony, on November 6, really successful? A verdict, and a possible $250 million in penalties, won’t come until next month. So time will tell. His testimony certainly was odd.
Trump used his time on the stand to ramble through many tangents, including that the trial is “very, very unfair,” and that New York Attorney General Letitia James, the lead plaintiff in the civil case, is a “political hack.”
“I beseech you to control him if you can. If you can’t, I will,” the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, said just 40 minutes into Trump’s testimony.
Reuters/Pool
“… answering all questions having to do with the Fake, No Victims, No Jury lawsuit, thrown at me the Corrupt Racist A.G., Letitia James, and presided over by a Trump hating judge who suffers from a massive case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and is a puppet for the CROOKED A.G.”
Were there “No victims” in this “No Jury” trial?
Banks made hundreds of millions of dollars in interest off of Trump’s loans, testimony has shown. But they also lost out on some $170 million in additional interest payments thanks to Trump exaggerating his net worth in financial documents, James alleges.
And while it’s true that it’s a “No Jury” trial, this sort of case does not typically call for a jury, and Trump’s own defense team failed to even ask for one.
The “Corrupt, Racist A.G.” and “Trump hating judge”
The former president’s name calling is nothing new in the case, as he has lobbed insults for years at the judge, the “racist” attorney general, and the $250 million civil fraud lawsuit now on trial.
As for the allegedly “Trump hating” judge, Engoron has kept his personal opinions out of the case, though he’s certainly shown himself to be fraud-hating.
“Anyway, the Judge, Arthur Engoron, put a GAG ORDER on me, even when I testify, totally taking away my constitutional right to defend myself.”
Trump speaks of the very limited gag order that was imposed on him after he identified and attacked the judge’s principal law clerk in a Truth Social post just one day after the trial’s October 3 start.
Trump does not explain in Tuesday’s “truth” how being barred from speaking about Engoron’s law clerks keeps him from defending himself.
But the same gag was in place on November 6 when, in compliance with an AG subpoena, he testified for the first time in the trial.
And that time around, he made no mention of the gag somehow depriving him of his rights. But that time around he had no choice of whether to testify. Monday’s testimony would have been entirely optional.
“We are appealing, but how would you like to be a witness and not be allowed free snd [sic] honest speech. THE TRIAL IS RIGGED. I DID NOTHING WRONG!!!”
Trump is appealing the gag, as are his lawyers, who are similarly barred from making statements about the judge’s law staff.
Finally, as for doing nothing wrong, the judge has already found, pretrial, that a decade’s worth of Trump’s annual net-worth statements were riddled with fraud.
The current trial will further determine if five defendants – Trump, his two adult sons, and two longstanding executives, former CFO Allen Weisselberg and former controller Jeff McConney – violated New York business and insurance fraud law, and what, if anything, the penalties will be.
