Trump's latest legal faceplant in fraud case is 'almost unbelievable': former prosecutor
December 14, 2023
Former President Donald Trump suffered yet another legal blow on Thursday as a New York appeals court threw out his bid to get the gag order in his civil fraud trial lifted.
Trump's case was doomed, noted former federal prosecutor and legal commentator Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC, by the odd way in which he chose to file it — by suing Judge Arthur Engoron for having imposed the order in the first place.
"How many times can Trump lose here?" asked anchor Jen Psaki. "Trying to keep track what's happening with the gag order?"
"On the merits this is a loss," said Weissmann. "Although I will say the court did say that procedurally, he basically went down the wrong route."
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"Here he tried to actually just sue the judge in what's called an Article 78 proceeding. That's sort of an arcane process in New York," Weissmann continued. "And basically the court said that it's not really meritorious, but also you should have just done it with your normal appeal. It can't be brought by suing the judge, and ... they also pointed out how limited the gag order is."
"This is one where it's almost unbelievable, because you can't find a lot of precedent for something like this, because who in their right mind thinks, oh, you know what I want to do? I want to attack the staff of the court," added Weissmann. "It's just — it just isn't done. So usually the case law is about about, more about real speech. So the kind of thing that we have seen in the D.C. criminal case, where he also lost."
Watch the video below and at the link.
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