Verbal attacks by Trump and allies are creating a hostile climate that endangers judges’ safety, experts say
Peter Stone at The Guardian:
US judges who have increasingly rebuked the Trump administration’s harsh deportation agenda and other Maga policies are facing intense verbal assaults from the president and his allies, which seem to be spurring other dangerous threats against judges, say legal experts and former judges. The Trump administration’s escalating fight with the courts has come as more than 200 lawsuits have challenged executive orders and policies on multiple issues including immigrant deportations, penalizing law firms with links to political foes, agency spending and workforce cuts, and other matters. The wave of litigation has resulted in more than 100 executive orders by Trump and other initiatives being halted temporarily or paused by court rulings from judges appointed by both Democrats and Republicans including some by Trump. Increasingly, ex-judges and legal experts warn the verbal attacks by Trump, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, and Maga allies are creating a hostile climate that endangers the safety of judges and their families. “The constant mischaracterization by Trump and his allies of judicial rulings as political in nature, together with their false, vituperative and ad hominem attacks on individual judges who make them, skews the public’s perception of the work of the federal judiciary,” said ex-federal judge John Jones, who is now the president of Dickinson College. Jones added: “These attacks foment a climate where the safety of judges and their families is at high risk.” Those risks were underscored when the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, Richard Durbin, this month wrote to Bondi and the FBI director, Kash Patel, requesting an investigation into anonymous pizza deliveries to at least a dozen judges that seem aimed at intimidating them as they handle cases involving the administration. Durbin’s letter noted some of the pizza deliveries were made in the name of US district judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, who was fatally shot in 2020 by a lawyer who pretended to be a delivery person, according to an April missive from Salas and attorney Paul Kiesel.
Elsewhere, Jones and more than two dozen other ex-judges issued a strong statement on Law Day this month announcing a new Article III Coalition linked to the non-partisan group Keep Our Republic to back judicial independence and warn of the dangers to judges posed by the Trump administration’s vitriolic attacks. On a related track more than 150 ex-federal and state judges from both parties in early May signed a letter to Bondi and Patel denouncing the administration’s rising attacks on the judiciary and the unusual arrest of a Milwaukee judge charged with impeding federal agents from arresting an allegedly undocumented migrant in Wisconsin.
[...] Still, legal scholars and ex-judges warn the Trump administration has created a hostile climate with many judges by pushing factually and legally dubious cases, and trying to smear judges who ruled against them. “Federal courts have always been ready to rebuke a justice department lawyer for concealing or misstating the facts or the law,” said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who is now a law professor at Columbia. “Now judges are increasingly presented with Trump administration emissaries who are poorly prepared to assist courts and who stand by when their leaders respond to adverse decisions by personally attacking judges. The credibility the government has with judges has long been a priceless asset. It’s disappearing fast.”
The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania said the Trump administration’s court setbacks were linked to their legally flawed cases. “It appears the president is being beaten in court on a regular basis because many of his executive orders are legally and constitutionally questionable,” Dent said. “His lawyers are trying to argue weak cases and that’s why they’re losing.” Dent added that Trump was “throwing mud against the wall to see what sticks. If it doesn’t stick he blames the courts.” Gertner stressed: “Trump has pushed constitutional and statutory limits beyond recognition especially with regard to the Alien Enemies Act … Anyone on US soil has due process rights under the constitution, which means at the minimum a hearing.” Some judges who have tangled with Trump and federal prosecutors over the administration’s radical deportation policies have been ensnared in extended court battles to get straight answers and facts from government lawyers. Boasberg, who has been appointed at different times by presidents of both parties, opened a contempt hearing against the administration after it flouted an injunction to block Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport dozens of suspected Venezuelan gang members. In response, the Trump administration invoked the State Secrets Act to block his inquiry into whether it defied a Boasberg order to turn around planes deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador.
Judges across the country that issue rulings against Donald Trump’s policies are facing a barrage of threats and abuse by Trump and his MAGA allies.
