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(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
On the final day of Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York, the judge presiding over his case woke up to a bomb threat.
As first reported by the Daily Beast, the Nassau County Police Department showed up at the home of Justice Arthur Engoron with the bomb squad in tow, just hours after the former president complained on social media that “THE TRUMP HATING JUDGE AND ATTORNEY GENERAL ARE WORKING CLOSELY TOGETHER TO “SCREW ME” and called the jurist “MEAN & NASTY.”
Although Trump’s lawyers play dumb about the specter of violence that lurks behind Trump’s social media attacks, his targets are routinely subject to an avalanche of threats and harassment. Justice Engoron isn’t even the first judge this year to get swatted by Trump supporters. That honor belongs to US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presides over Trump’s election interference case and who was visited by police on January 7 after a false report of a shooting at her home. Special Counsel Jack Smith was swatted on Christmas day, and Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was the subject of a fake emergency call on December 29, the day after she removed Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot. In this very case, Justice Engoron’s law clerk has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, much of it antisemitic, after Trump and his lawyers made her the target of their campaign to undermine the trial.
The threat follows the weeklong kerfuffle over Trump’s ostensible demand to deliver his own closing argument. Increasingly inappropriate emails from his lawyer Chris Kise reveal that the plan was never to get his client a speaking role. They aimed to provoke a denial, and then enlist their media allies to claim that the court was stifling his speech. And Laura Ingraham, a former Supreme Court clerk who certainly knows better, was only too happy to oblige.
In a last ditch effort to get the hearing postponed, Kise pointed to the death of Trump’s mother-in-law “who he was very close to.” After this failed, Trump dispensed with any pretense of grief over this “deeply personal family matter” and went ahead with his Fox News town hall as planned. This morning he announced that he was “Heading down to the Unconstitutional Witch Hunt in Lower Manhattan. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!”
In a rambling address to reporters outside the courtroom this morning, Trump continued to pretend that he intended to speak in court.
“At this point, the judge is not letting me make the summation because I’ll bring up things that he doesn’t want to hear. It’s a very unfair trial, nobody’s seen anything like it,” he babbled.
What Trump did not say, and has not said even once, is that his supporters should stop threatening violence to the judge and the law clerk, or any of his other political enemies. Because of course, that is exactly what he intends when he spews lies about the judge’s wife and his son and his law clerk. He’s deliberately enlisting his goons in a campaign of intimidation, and he’s counting on them to keep it up forever.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos substack and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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