by An avalanche of credible death threats and anti-Semitic messages has inundated the judge and court staff overseeing Donald Trump’s fraud trial in New York, according to the court’s top public safety official.
Judge Arthur Engoron and his clerk received “hundreds of threats, derogatory and harassing comments, and anti-Semitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment, according to a court filing to support a gag order preventing Trump from attacking court staff.
Transcripts of threatening voicemails after Trump first attacked Judge Engoron’s chief clerk span more than 275 single-spaced pages, according to Wednesday’s document.
The threats against them are “serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative,” according to the presentation by Charles Hollon, a court Department of Public Safety officer-captain assigned to a judicial threats unit.
“You should be executed,” one message reads.
“Believe me when I say this,” reads another. “I’ll come for you. I don’t care. No one will stop me either.”
Last week, a state appeals court judge temporarily froze two gag orders that Judge Engoron implemented to protect his court staff from Trump’s abuse and subsequent attacks that swamped his office.
“The implementation of the limited gag orders resulted in a decrease in the number of threats, harassment and derogatory messages received by the judge and his staff,” Hollon wrote in Wednesday’s filing.
“However, when Mr. Trump violated gag orders, the number of threatening, harassing and derogatory messages increased,” he added.
Trump’s false statements about Greenfield, which Judge Engoron ordered him to remove from Truth Social, “resulted in hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemails,” according to Hollon’s statement.
Her cell phone and email address were reportedly hacked, “resulting in daily doxing,” and she has since been subjected to “harassment, derogatory comments, and anti-Semitic tropes” on a daily basis.
He receives dozens of harassing phone calls, social media messages and emails each day, half of which are anti-Semitic, according to Hollon.
The filing attaches several transcripts of voice messages, including one left for Ms. Greenfield: “Jews like you. Stupid fat *******. Put down the Twinkies, dammit. You are clearly a bastard and a child molester. You are a fucking pedophile *****. Anyway, listen. You look like shit. You’re fucking dirty. Ugly. Dirty. I bet your shit smells like a garbage disposal. Guaranteed. Anyway, lose a little weight. “Be a little proud of yourself, you fat bastard.”
Those threats have “created an ongoing safety risk for the judge, his staff, and his family,” Hollon wrote.
Earlier this month, Judge Engoron rejected what he called “unconvincing” First Amendment arguments from Trump’s lawyers against his gag orders, pointing to threats of political violence that have surrounded the former president’s criminal and civil cases since his first accusation earlier this year.
“The threat of actual violence and the threat of violence resulting from heated political rhetoric are well documented,” Judge Engoron wrote.
It said its offices “have been inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters and packages.”
“The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm,” he added.
Wednesday’s filing supports the judge’s appeal of last week’s order, which has freed Trump and other parties in the trial from disparaging members of the court.
A week after the gag order was lifted, Trump posted about employee Allison Greenfield at least three times on his Truth Social account.
Moments after the gag was lifted on Nov. 16, he called her a “politically biased, out-of-control Trump-hating secretary who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW.”
Two days later, he attacked “corrupt and highly partisan law clerk Allison Greenfield.”
“Regardless of what we say to show our TOTAL INNOCENCE, and it has been proven many times over, this Trump-hating political judge, along with her horrendous, furious legal assistant, with their illegal contributions to his campaign, I They will plead guilty as hell,” he wrote on November 21.
A lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses the former president, his two adult children and his main business partners of grossly inflating his net worth and assets in financial statements submitted to banks and lenders for financing terms. favorable.
Judge Engoron has already found the defendants liable for fraud.
The trial, now in its eighth week, threatens to collapse his real estate empire in the state and could result in tens of millions of dollars in fines against the defendants.
Federal judges are also reviewing a gag order against Trump in a case related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
During a hearing Monday, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court was skeptical of his legal team’s arguments to overturn a gag order preventing him from attacking witnesses and prosecutors in the criminal conspiracy case.
The justices seemed likely to narrow the scope of the order, in an attempt to balance First Amendment protections around political speech while also addressing the wave of threats and harassment unleashed by Trump and his supporters toward prosecutors, judges , witnesses and potential jurors involved in the case. a growing number of cases against him.
A recent document filed by U.S. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith’s team described that dynamic as “part of a pattern, dating back years, in which people publicly attacked” by Trump are “ subject to harassment, threats and intimidation.”
Trump “seeks to use this known dynamic to his advantage,” the document adds, and “has continued unabated as this case and other unrelated cases involving the defendant have progressed.”
