Trump is fined $10,000 over a comment he made outside court in his New York civil fraud trial

abcnews.go.com:

The judge in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial has fined the former president $10,000

NEW YORK — Donald Trump was abruptly called to the witness stand and then fined $10,000 on Wednesday after the judge in his civil fraud trial said the former president had violated a gag order. It was the second time in less than a week that Trump was penalized for his out-of-court comments.

Before imposing the latest fine, Judge Arthur Engoron summoned Trump from the defense table to testify about his comment to reporters hours earlier about “a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside” the judge.

Engoron had already ordered all participants in the trial not to comment publicly about his staff. That restriction from Oct. 3 followed a Trump social media post that maligned the judge's principal law clerk, who sits next to him.

Trump and his lawyers insisted that his comment Wednesday was not about the clerk. They said he was referring to Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who had been testifying.

Engoron said Trump's claim was “not credible," noting that he sat closer to the clerk than to Cohen.

“The idea that the statement would refer to the witness,” Engoron said, “doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Five days earlier, Trump had been fined $5,000 after Engoron learned that the offending social media post from early October had lingered on Trump's campaign website for weeks after being taken down — on the judge's orders — from Trump's Truth Social media platform.

Then, on Wednesday, the Republican presidential front-runner complained in a courthouse hallway that Engoron, a Democrat, is «a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

Under oath on the