I pretend I’m an elder millennial, but in reality, I am a Gen X-er who came of age in the mid-to-late ‘90s. And if there’s one film that captures my suburban Southern California teen years, it’s “Clueless,” Amy Heckerling’s 1995 retelling of Jane Austen’s “Emma” via a Beverly Hills high school. I’ve seen it so many times that I’ve committed most of the script to memory, to the annoyance of my family.
And that’s perhaps how and why, as I stood, shoulder to shoulder, with other reporters in the clerk’s office of a New York state appeals court on Monday, “Clueless” immediately leaped to mind.
But let’s rewind the VCR, so to speak. How did we all find ourselves crammed into an administrative office?
You might remember that a four-judge panel of New York’s first tier of appeals courts last Thursday lifted the temporary stay of Judge Arthur Engoron’s twin gag orders on Donald Trump and his lawyers in the civil fraud trial against the former president and others.
And that meant that as of Thursday afternoon, Trump was once again prohibited from making any statement, whether in or outside court, about the judge’s courtroom staff, including the judge’s principal law clerk. At that time, I understood, due to the nature of the relief Trump sought and my analysis of New York court rules, that Trump would be stuck with that gag order through the duration of the trial, including his own testimony.
Rather than sitting in an elegant courtroom, we witnessed a surreal scene unfold in the clerk’s office.
Nonetheless, I was warned that Trump could always swing for the fences with some unusual legal maneuver. And indeed, by Monday morning, Trump’s lawyers filed papers essentially asking a single judge of the same court that lifted the stay to permit him to appeal that order to New York’s highest court, the confusingly-named Court of Appeals, while rushing briefing on the merits of his appeal, both by Wednesday. That would allow them…
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