Donald Trump celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday this week by taking advantage of a pause in the gag order he’d been under in his civil fraud trial, attacking New York Attorney General Letitia James, Judge Arthur Engoron, and his law clerk in a social media tirade. “Happy Thanksgiving to ALL,” Trump wrote, including the “racist” AG, the “psycho” judge, and the “corrupt” clerk, all of whom he accused of conspiring with Joe Biden and others “who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”
“Have no fear, however, we will WIN the Presidential Election of 2024,” the former president concluded, and “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
It was a characteristically unglued missive—a peek into the sad and disturbed inner workings of the GOP frontrunner’s mind. It was also the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that has triggered a “deluge” of threats against Engoron and his clerk, according to a court filing Wednesday seeking to reinstate the limited gag order against Trump.
Per the filing, Engoron—the judge overseeing the trial who has clashed with Trump and his attorneys during the case—has been the target of “credible” threats for months. And his clerk, whom Trump has falsely described as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s “girlfriend” and accused of political bias, has received “hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages that have been transcribed into over 275 single-spaced pages.”
Her “personal information, including her personal cell phone number and personal email addresses, also have been compromised resulting in daily doxing,” wrote Charles Hollon, an official in the Public Safety Department’s Judicial Threats Assessment Unit. “She has also been subjected to, on a daily basis, harassing, disparaging comments and antisemitic tropes”—including 20 to 30 calls daily on her cell phone, and up to 50 messages a day by email and social media, thanks to Trump’s broadsides.
The former president has already been fined twice for violating Engoron’s gag order, but an appeals court last week temporarily put a pause on the restriction, and he has resumed freely attacking the $250 million fraud case as “election interference.” The goal, of course, is not only to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the legal system and the cases against him, but to intimidate those involved in the process. It may not do much for him in a tangible sense; he’s already been found liable for inflating his business assets in the case, and his diatribes against James, Engoron, and the clerk could ultimately get his gag order reinstated next week. But it could allow him to continue casting himself as a kind of martyr figure for his base—and to rally them around his promise of revenge.
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