Lawyer gives 'three words' that hammer home need to rein in Trump's attacks on courts
March 29, 2024
In the wake of rising far-right hostility to the courts, possibly fueled by former President Donald Trump's ongoing attacks against judges overseeing his litigation and even their families, an MSNBC panel had some dark fears about where it's all heading.
"The question I ask again, to all the lawyers is, what is it going to take for a judge to finally say, enough, and either level a giant fine against Trump or take the step that is within their power in these circumstances, if he violates a gag order, and toss him in the pokey for some period of time?" asked analyst John Heilemann. "What's it going to take? Are we ever going to see that or not?"
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin, herself a former litigator, said that is "a really difficult question to answer."
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"But I'm also not sure that issuing a further gag order is necessarily the answer here," she added. "I had a conversation earlier today with Michael Cohen, who as we all know is a known witness in this upcoming case ... we can talk about all the ways in which Judge Merchan and his daughter are not currently protected and Michael Cohen is. And Michael Cohen's point to me was, if you think that the gag order changes the universe in which I live as a witness and a known enemy of Donald Trump, you've got something else coming. I walk down the street every day in fear. I get death threats every day because I am a person known to be involved in this proceeding. And the fact that he can no longer speak out against me, even if he abides by that order, doesn't change the daily existence for me and my family."
The fundamental reality, Rubin continued, is that Trump doesn't need to attack or threaten witnesses against him directly anymore — his followers just do that on their own now.
"I think about three words: they are Abigail Jo Shry," said Rubin. "She's the one who called Tanya Chutkan's chambers and made a threat to her voicemail that it is so ugly that I won't repeat it here, except to say Ms. Shry is now under indictment herself. We used to live in a world where the threats to judges were from actual litigants before them. That's the situation in which Judge Salas found herself when her son was murdered by somebody who had been a litigant before her. This was also the case in the case of federal Judge Joan Lefkow, whose husband and mother were murdered by someone who had been a litigant before her. Years before then, there was a federal district judge in New York who was murdered in his backyard by the father of a woman who had a sex bias case against him that he had dismissed."
"But we're far afield from that now," she added. "The threats to judges and their families are no longer even coming from actual litigants. They are coming from adherents to every word that those litigants utter, and words that they might not be uttering at all but people in their universes are uttering as surrogates on their behalf without any fingerprints on it, without any even overt encouragement or direction. That's the atmosphere in which we're living now, and I fear that the gag order itself is insufficient for the times in which we live."
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