Oct. 18 (UPI) — As former President Donald Trump appeared voluntarily at his civil business fraud trial in New York City on Wednesday, the proceedings were briefly halted after a Trump lawyer accused a witness of lying.
That triggered several minutes of sometimes shouted accusations back and forth about witness lying and intimidation.
“You lied, yesterday, didn’t you?” a lawyer for Trump’s defense shouted at witness Doug Larson, a former Trump Organization appraiser.
That question and the shouting that followed prompted Judge Arthur Engoron to urge everyone to calm down as the trial stopped while Larson was escorted out.
And as Trump was overheard whispering angrily to his lawyers and hitting the defense table with both hands, New York Attorney General Letitia James objected to what she called “exhortations” from the defense table.
Engoron instructed people in the courtroom to keep quiet following the former president’s display of emotion.
Trump, adult sons Eric and Don Jr., and the Trump Organization are accused of perpetrating a decades-long fraud that exaggerated Trump’s net worth by as much as $3.6 billion a year.
Meanwhile, in the separate criminal election subversion case against Trump in Washington D.C. his lawyers Wednesday filed an appeal to a partial gag order in this case imposed by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
She imposed the order preventing Trump from issuing statements that target special counsel Jack Smith and his team, as well as staff working with Chutkan and other personnel in the D.C. district court.
Trump lawyers asserted in the appeal that the gag order prevents him from criticizing some of the people alleged to be involved in the political campaign against him.
Judge Engoron imposed a gag order on Trump and all parties in the civil fraud case in New York earlier this month, barring them from publicly speaking against any member of the judge’s staff in that case.
Engoron ruled in September that Trump did, indeed, fraudulently inflate his property values, granting a summary motion by James.
In reaching that decision, Engoron said that Trump inflated the value of his apartment in Trump Tower alone by as much as $207 million.
“A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron said in his order.
