A New York court employee was arrested after approaching the bench attempting to speak with former President Donald Trump during his civil fraud trail, officials said.
The woman “disrupted the proceedings by standing up and walking towards the front of the courtroom and yelling out to Mr. Trump indicating she wanted to assist him,” Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the New York State Unified Court System, told news outlets on Wednesday.
The woman, who was not named, was stopped by court officers before getting close to President Trump or his lawyers. “None of the parties were ever in any danger,” Mr. Chalfen said.
The individual was later determined to be an employee of the court. She was charged with contempt of court in the second degree, the spokesman said.
The woman was placed on “immediate administrative leave” as an investigation is underway, Mr. Chalfen added. She’s also not allowed to enter any facility of the New York State Unified Court System “until further notice,” he said.
No other details about the incident or the woman’s identity were provided.
Despite the arrest, Trump attorney Chris Kise told The Hill that he didn’t notice anything amiss in the courtroom on Wednesday.
President Trump was in court for a second straight day Wednesday, coming back from Iowa, New Hampshire, and other 2024 campaign stops to give close attention to the case. The former president attended the first three days, but skipped last week’s hearings. On Tuesday, he left early to give a deposition in an unrelated lawsuit.
In a pretrial decision last month, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that the former president and his company, the Trump Organization, committed years of fraud by exaggerating his asset values and net worth on annual financial statements used to make deals and get better terms on loans and insurance. President Trump has denied those claims.
The judge ordered that a court-appointed receiver take control of some President Trump companies, putting the future oversight of Trump Tower and other marquee properties in question. But an appeals court has blocked that for now.
On the trial’s second day, the judge, a Democrat, issued a limited gag order barring parties in the case from smearing members of his staff. Last year, Judge Engoron held President Trump in contempt and fined him $110,000 for being slow to respond to a subpoena from James’s office.
The former president on Tuesday said outside court that he had grown to like and respect Judge Engoron, but that he believes Democrats are “pushing him around like a pinball.”
“It’s a very unfair situation that they put me in,” he said.
His civil trial doesn’t have a jury. Instead, Judge Engoron is presiding over what’s known as a bench trial. He will issue a ruling once the trial is over.
Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the former president, the Trump Organization, and his two adult sons—Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.—alleging decades of fraud in their real estate business. It alleges that the company falsely inflated and deflated the value of its assets.
In a pretrial court filing, Ms. James’s office estimated that President Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion. However, the former president has argued that it was actually undervalued.
The former president has decried the case as part of a longstanding Democrat attempt to politically wound him and damage his chances of recapturing the presidency. He’s also accused the trial judge and Ms. James of being biased against him.
“We built a great company—a lot of cash, it’s got a lot of great assets, some of the greatest real estate assets anywhere in the world,” President Trump said outside the courtroom this week. The case, he said, is “a disgrace,” and described the U.S. legal system as “corrupt” and the Democratic attorney general as a “radical lunatic.”
Ms. James, who said during her election campaign in 2018 that she would investigate President Trump, wants the Trump defendants banned from doing business in New York. She’s also seeking $250 million in penalties.
