'We know where you live': Expert describes MAGA's 'intolerable' threats to federal judges

09 May

Far-right groups including the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys join a "Back the Blue" rally in Portland, Oregon on August 22, 2020 (Image: Shutterstock)

Since his second term began in January, President Donald Trump's actions have already been struck down more than 200 times by federal judges in over 128 cases. And some of the judges behind those rulings have experienced a rash of direct threats.

On Friday, Duke University law professor Paul Grimm joined MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace's "Deadline: White House" to go into detail about the increased pattern of threats against judges who have ruled against the Trump administration. Grimm argued that judges feeling intimidated by politically motivated threats undermines a core element of the Constitution, which is the duty of Article III judges to conduct "judicial review" of decisions made by Congress and the president.

"The way in which you make sure that courts rule in a way that protects the Constitutional guardrails is that they have to be independent. They have to rule without fear or favor," Grimm said. "And anything that is done which is designed to chill or intimidate or threaten judges, undermines that important rule that they have."

"No one would want to appear before a judge if they thought that the judge's decision was going to be affected by whether the judge would be subject to personal attack if they ruled a certain way," he continued. "That would be absolutely destructive to the rule of law."

Both Wallace and Grimm referenced a Reuters article published earlier this month that reported at least 11 federal judges who have ruled against Trump have received threats against themselves or their families. This includes Judges James Boasberg and John McConnell, who ruled against Trump on deportations of Venezuelan immigrants and on Congressionally appropriated funding for federal agencies, respectively. Reuters reported that far-right, pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer posted a photo of McConnell's daughter and accused the judge of ruling against Trump to protect her federal job, which was later retweeted by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to his hundreds of millions of followers. Neither Loomer nor Musk mentioned that McConnell's daughter quit her position at the U.S. Department of Education prior to Trump's January 20 inauguration.

Grimm went on to note that some of Trump's supporters have even gone so far as to have food delivered to the homes of federal judges who ruled against the administration, opining that this sent an ominous message on its own.

"There have been over 200 cases where judges in the United States have anonymously received pizzas from individuals, where they didn't order that. The implicit threat there is: 'We know where you live.' And in half a dozen of those cases, they were purported to have been sent by Daniel Anderl, the murdered son of Judge Esther Salas of the District of New Jersey, who was gunned down when someone came to his house to assassinate his mother, a district judge, and he was at the door and prevented the person from coming in and doing that," he said. "So to send a pizza to a judge saying, 'this is from Daniel Anderl,' this community, the kind of threat that we have never seen happen before. and those types of threats are simply intolerable."

Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.

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