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The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him $1,000, adding that future gag order violations could send him to jail.
The testimony from former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney said there were reimbursed payments that were allegedly meant to suppress embarrassing stories from surfacing during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and then logged them as legal expenses in a manner that Manhattan prosecutors say broke the law.
McConney’s appearance on the witness stand came as the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president entered its third week of testimony.
At the center of the testimony was a $130,000 payment Trump’s then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen made to porn actor Stormy Daniels in October 2016 to stifle her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier.
The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records accuse Trump of labeling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees. Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes in monthly installments for a year, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.
McConney and another witness testified that all but two of the monthly checks were drawn from Trump’s personal account. Yet even as jurors saw the checks and other documentary evidence, prosecutors did not elicit testimony Monday showing that Trump himself dictated that the payments would be logged as legal expenses — a designation that prosecutors contend was intentionally deceptive.
McConney acknowledged during cross-examination that Trump never asked him to log the reimbursements as legal expenses and never discussed the matter with him at all. Another witness, Deborah Tarasoff, a Trump Organization accounts payable supervisor, said under questioning that she did not get permission to cut the checks in question from Trump himself.
“You never had any reason to believe that President Trump was hiding anything or anything like that?” Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked.
The testimony followed Judge Juan M. Merchan’s sober warning to Trump that additional violations of a gag order barring inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case could land the former president behind bars.
The $1,000 fine imposed Monday marks the second time since the trial began last month that Trump has been sanctioned for violating the gag order. He was fined $9,000 last week — $1,000 for each of nine violations.
“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent. Therefore going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” Merchan said before jurors were brought into the courtroom.
Trump’s statements, the judge added, “threaten to interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue.”
With Trump, the only signatory to that account, now in the White House, the change in funding source necessitated “a whole new process for us,” McConney added.
