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How Trump Encourages Death Threats To Judges -- Including Republicans

How Trump Encourages Death Threats To Judges -- Including Republicans

When attorney Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee in 2019, he delivered a key insight into his former boss Donald Trump. “He doesn’t give you questions,” said Cohen. “He doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in code, and I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”

Since Trump launched his run for office in 2015, millions of his fanatic supporters have learned to parse that code as well. Trump is counting on it. And when he tells them that a prosecutor is a racist or that a judge is “crazy, totally unhinged, and dangerous,” or when he falsely accuses the judge’s wife of running an anti-Trump social media account and sows conspiracy theories about a law clerk, his followers read Trump’s desires loud and clear.

Judges, prosecutors, and others who earn the ire of Trump are experiencing an “unprecedented wave of threats,” according to a Reuters report published on Thursday. So many that it has exploded the number of threats across the whole judicial system.

Trump’s social media attacks frequently include the names of prosecutors and judges. These attacks are so frequent that for most of the first half of 2023, Trump’s attacks on the legal system exceeded the number of posts for his presidential campaign.

He frequently claims that all of the charges against him are part of a single scheme controlled by President Joe Biden, and accuses judges of being part of a system that has been directed against him for political purposes. He also presents his indictments not as the result of crimes he has committed, but as something he suffers for all his followers.

“Joe Biden has weaponized law enforcement to interfere in our elections,” Trump told the audience at a conservative conference last June. “I’m being indicted for you.”

That theme has been repeated over and over on both his social media and at his rallies. Trump presents himself to his followers as the Christ-like victim of unwarranted persecution, suffering bravely against forces that, if they weren’t busy with him, would come after the humble people paying his legal bills. That helps to explain, though certainly not excuse, why threats against judges, prosecutors, and their staffs have more than tripled since Trump rode down the golden escalator.

It’s not just judges and prosecutors in Trump’s current civil and criminal cases who have come under threat. Well before the current round of cases, Trump was attacking judges, prosecutors, and even members of the jury.

As Trump and his allies were losing over 60 cases in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, judges came under intense pressure.

“I could not believe how many death threats I got,” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth told Reuters. When Lamberth’s home phone number reached the public, one man reportedly called his home repeatedly and graphically promised to kill him.

The U.S. Marshals Service is responsible for tracking and responding to threats against the judiciary. In the decade before Trump’s 2016 campaign, they fielded an average of 1,180 incidents a year. Over the seven years following his candidacy, that number rose to 3,810.

Retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor told Reuters that, “Donald Trump set the stage.” The former Republican justice said that Trump “gave permission by his actions and words for others to come forward and talk about judges in terms not just criticizing their decisions, but disparaging them and the entire judiciary.”

Most of those making threats against judges are reportedly not found. Others, like the man who made repeated death threats against Lamberth, get off with a warning from the Marshals Service. In the past four years, Reuters identified 57 federal prosecutions for threats to judges. It’s hard to know how this compares to past periods because no one appears to be keeping a public database of these prosecutions. However, based on the rising volume of threats, it would be frightening if this number were not higher than in the past.

Halfway through his trial for fraudulently overvaluing his real estate holdings, Trump was well aware that his social media posts attacking Judge Arthur Engoron and law clerk Allison Greenfield had received hundreds of credible threats. But when his gag order was briefly lifted, Trump used that time to go back on the attack. And when the order stopped him from attacking Greenfield, Trump leveled his false accusations at Engoron’s wife.

As Cohen said in his 2019 testimony, Trump “doesn’t give you orders.” But his meaning is clear. Trump no doubt knows the kind of violent threats that his social media posts and statements inspire. It’s hard to believe this isn’t exactly why he does it.

Direct threats are a crime, but incitement to violence is very difficult to prove. As the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University explains, “The First Amendment does not protect speech that incites imminent violence.” But the bar for committing incitement is set very high, high enough that simply telling your followers that someone is a terrible racist who is unfairly prosecuting you out of hate is still protected … even if you have a very good idea of what your followers might do in response.

When Trump includes people like staffers and family members, who have no say in his case but whose safety is concerning to the judges and prosecutors working the case, he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s sending a signal to his followers, and to everyone in the judiciary.

Trump’s words are the lever. The threats are the result. The fear is what he wants.

And if someone acts on those threats … Well, it’s not like Trump gave them any orders.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Danziger: Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Trumped

Danziger: Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Trumped

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam as a linguist and intelligence officer, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. Born in New York City, he now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Obama Judges Leave Liberal Imprint On U.S. Law

Obama Judges Leave Liberal Imprint On U.S. Law

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, the federal appeals court based in Virginia was known as one of the most conservative benches in the country.

Two Obama terms later, Democratic appointees hold a 10-5 majority on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of which issued a groundbreaking ruling this April backing transgender rights.

The shift to the left on the court, which hears cases from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina, highlights a widely overlooked aspect of Obama’s legacy.

His appointments of dozens of judges to the country’s influential federal appeals courts have tilted the judiciary in a liberal direction that will influence rulings for years to come and be further entrenched if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins this November’s presidential election.

A Reuters review of rulings by the courts over the last two years shows Obama’s appointees to the appeals courts have influenced major legal battles likely to ultimately reach the Supreme Court.

Obama-appointed judges have voted in favor of broad civil rights protections, major Obama administration regulations and gun regulations and against Republican-backed voting rules.

“There’s no question President Obama’s nominees have absolutely been part of his effort to transform the country and move it dramatically to the left,” said Carrie Severino, a conservative legal activist.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that Obama’s appointees “all share impeccable qualifications, unquestioned integrity, and a steadfast commitment to equal justice under the law.”

The appeals courts are the first stop for any case appealed from the lower U.S. district courts and often have the last word. The next and final destination is the Supreme Court, but it hears fewer than 100 cases a year. The appeals courts handle 35,000 a year according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Of the 13 appeals courts, nine now have a majority of Democratic appointees, compared with one when Obama took office, according to research carried out by Russell Wheeler, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

In addition to appointing two Supreme Court justices and dozens of district court judges, Obama appointments now make up 55 of the current 168 appeals court judges, according to the judiciary. Obama’s current total of 323 district and appeals court appointments, most of them district court judges, is similar to the tallies achieved by other recent two-term presidents.

The regional appeals courts are currently more powerful than ever because of the vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, which has left the court divided equally between liberals and conservatives. If the ideologically divided court splits 4-4, the appeals court ruling is left intact. Such an outcome occurred four times in the Supreme Court term that recently ended.

Scalia’s seat is unlikely to be filled until next year due to political opposition from Republicans in the Senate, which has the job of confirming nominees.

COURTS TRANSFORMED

One of the most dramatic transformations has been on the 4th Circuit.

In July 2007, 18 months before Obama became president, Republican appointees held a 7-5 majority. Through a mix of seven Obama appointments and retirements, Democratic appointees now hold sway.

In April, a three-judge panel featuring two Obama appointees ruled in favor of a transgender student seeking to use a boys’ restroom. The two Obama appointees were in the majority, with a Republican appointee dissenting.

Three months later, a three-judge panel featuring two Obama appointees and one judge appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton struck down North Carolina’s strict voter identification law on a 3-0 vote, saying the state legislature had enacted it with discriminatory intent.

It is one of several recent court rulings pushing back on Republican-led efforts to impose new voting regulations, which Democrats say is intended to deter minorities from voting.

Caroline Fredrickson, president of liberal legal group the American Constitution Society, said Republican-appointed judges are generally less likely to rule in favor of broad interpretations of civil rights. The transgender case would “very likely” have come out differently with a more conservative panel of judges, she said.

The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. is another where the balance of power has been flipped. Often known in legal circles as the second highest court in the land because it hears important cases concerning the federal government, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was dominated by conservatives 6-3 when Obama took office.

Obama was able to force through four appointments after a major showdown in the Senate. The court now has a 7-4 split in favor of Democratic appointees.

In June, an Obama appointee, Judge Sri Srinivasan, cast the deciding vote as a three-judge panel upheld the Federal Communication Commission’s so-called “net neutrality” regulation. Srinivasan joined a Clinton appointee in the majority. A judge appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan dissented. The regulation is widely opposed by the telecommunications industry and backed by digital rights advocates.

Obama’s appointees do sometimes vote in favor of conservative outcomes. Paul Watford, a judge on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has on several occasions reached a different conclusion to his more liberal colleagues. In one recent decision from Aug. 15, he dissented along with conservative judges when the court ruled that a death row inmate should be able to file a new appeal.

When announcing three of his nominees to the appeals court in Washington at a White House press conference in June 2013, Obama rejected any notion that they were political pawns, emphasizing their strong credentials.

“These are no slouches. These are no hacks,” he said.

A selection of recent U.S. appeals court rulings in which Obama judicial appointees played a significant role:

VOTING RIGHTS

4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, July 29

A three-judge panel featuring two Obama appointees struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law on a 3-0 vote, saying it had a discriminatory intent.

TRANSGENDER RIGHTS

4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, April 19

The court ruled 2-1 in favor of a transgender student seeking to use a boys’ restroom, with two Obama appointees in the majority.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS/INTERNET

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, June 14

On a 2-1 vote, with an Obama appointee in the majority, the court upheld the Federal Communication Commission’s major “net neutrality” regulation.

GUN RIGHTS

2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Oct. 19, 2015

A panel featuring two Obama appointees and one judge appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton rejected challenges to gun regulations in New York and Connecticut passed in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

CLASS ACTION LITIGATION

6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, July 7, 2015

The court allowed employee class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc to move forward. An Obama appointee wrote the opinion, while a Republican appointee partially dissented. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

EMPLOYMENT/CLASS ACTION

9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, August 22

A three-judge panel featuring one Obama nominee in the majority ruled 2-1 in favor of the right of employers to bring class claims against employers in a case involving Ernst & Young.
When seeking to appoint judges, the White House has said it is looking for highly credentialed lawyers reflecting the diversity of U.S. society. Conservative critics say he has picked judges who are willing to circumvent the law in order to reach preferred outcomes.

Photo:U.S. President Barack Obama speaks from the Rose Garden of the White House to announce his three nominees to fill vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Washington June 4, 2013. The nominees will be attorney Patricia Ann Millett (R), Georgetown law professor Cornelia Pillard (behind Obama) and U.S. District Court Judge Robert Leon Wilkins (L). REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Lift The Blockade On Confirming U.S. Judges

Lift The Blockade On Confirming U.S. Judges

By Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg News (TNS)

Almost a month into the 114th Senate, the new Republican majority still doesn’t know what to do about filibusters of judicial nominations. The latest? An idea floated recently to eliminate filibusters on Supreme Court nominations (or, technically, to change cloture to a simple majority) seems to be DOA.

The background on this is that when Democrats went “nuclear” in fall 2013, reducing the votes necessary for ending filibusters on judicial and executive-branch nominations from 60 to a simple Senate majority, they omitted Supreme Court confirmations.

Democrats weren’t objecting to ideology-based filibusters against specific nominees, but to the across-the-board blockades preventing the president from filling any judicial vacancy at all. The filibuster that pushed Democrats over the edge was over three seats on the District of Columbia Circuit Appeals Court.

Even if the Republican position was indefensible, it isn’t off base to require some kind of supermajority to approve judicial candidates for the Supreme Court and for other seats on the federal bench.

Federal judges hold lifetime appointments. It’s a little bit weird that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all have considerable influence today because of their choices still serving not only on the Supreme Court, but on the lower courts as well. It’s consistent with the spirit of the Constitution to establish rules that reward mainstream selections. It shouldn’t be easy for a small, temporary majority to set its preferences in stone for a generation.

I’ve been floating a compromise that would prevent blockades of nominations by the minority party, but would also give some check against easy confirmations: requiring a number of Senate votes equal to the number of majority-party senators to block filibusters on judicial nominations. So with 54 Republicans right now, cloture would require 54 votes.

Now, of course, when the government is divided (as it is now, with a Democratic president and a Republican majority in the Senate), the Senate majority party can defeat any nomination without even needing floor votes; it can just kill nominations in committee, or refuse to bring them up for a vote. But in periods of unified government, this compromise would allow the president’s choice to be confirmed only if the president’s party was 100 percent united on the nominee — or, if the majority party wasn’t unified, it would need to find some votes from the other party.

This would still allow a unified party (controlling the presidency and a Senate majority) to confirm anyone it wanted. Presumably, though, anyone supported by the president and the party’s entire Senate caucus, or an equivalent number of votes drawn from both parties, would have to be someone in the mainstream. Otherwise, party moderates (and there are always moderates) might defect, and no crossover votes would make up for it. If support for a prospective nominee is going to be a tough vote for some in the party, that would encourage the president to make a less controversial or factional choice.

This kind of supermajority system — for all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices — gives at least some protection to minority points of view without allowing partisan blockades such as the ones Republicans put up in the last Congress. Senators who are looking for a compromise should consider the idea.

I’d also shift the burden from majority to minority; instead of needing 54 votes to invoke cloture and therefore defeat a filibuster, I’d require 47 votes to sustain a filibuster. Filibusters are justified in part because intense minority opinions are important; therefore, absent senators should count against the minority, not the majority.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. Readers may send him email at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net.

Photo: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, waits for the start of the State of The Union address by President Barack Obama on January 20, 2015, in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Pool/TNS)