'Straight out of the autocrat’s playbook': Legal experts bash Trump’s attacks on judges

23 October 2023

Facing four criminal indictments as well as a variety of civil lawsuits, former President Donald Trump has been angrily railing against the judges in those cases.

One of the federal judges Trump has been attacking, Barack Obama appointee Tanya Chutkan, has imposed a partial gag order in special counsel Jack Smith's election interference prosecution. Chutkan's ruling is strictly for that case, not the others.

In an article published on October 21, The Guardian's Peter Stone warns that Trump's inflammatory attacks on judges and prosecutors — according to legal experts — are designed to undermine the United States' legal system and, by extension, U.S. democracy itself.

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Nancy Gertner, a retired judge who teaches at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told The Guardian, "Trump's attacks on judges poison the civil atmosphere and make physical attacks.… more likely. Trump is challenging the very role of judges…. If it's open season on judges in advance of trials, then we risk undermining the system. You can't have a trial in which the parties have poisoned the media coverage by attacking the judges."

Similarly, Richard Holwell, another former judge, told The Guardian, "When you have a former president calling judges corrupt and crooked, it tends to rend the fabric of our society and the judicial system."

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), a former constitutional law professor, believes that Trump's attacks on judges underscore his authoritarianism.

Raskin told The Guardian, "Trump's relationship to the law and the justice system is straight out of the autocrat's playbook. He's incapable of seeing judges acting in anything other than completely personal and political ways. The law and justice system are just a favor bank in Trump world."

The Democratic congressman added, "He's like a mob boss. For him, a judge is either a lackey in his pocket or his sworn enemy. Trump's legal and political agendas are fused at this point. His whole strategy is to avoid a reckoning with justice before the election."

The Guardian's full report is available at this link.

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