A flood of credible death threats and anti-Semitic messages has overwhelmed the judge and court staff overseeing Donald Trump’s fraud trial in New York, the court’s top public safety official said.
Judge Arthur Engoron and his law clerk received “hundreds of threats, disparaging and intimidating comments, and anti-Semitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment, according to a court filing in support of a silence order barring Trump from targeting court staff to fall.
Transcripts of threatening voicemails after Trump first targeted Judge Engoron’s law clerk fill more than 275 single-spaced pages, according to Wednesday’s filing.
The threats against them are “serious and credible and not hypothetical or speculative,” according to the filing of Charles Hollon, an officer captain in the court’s Department of Public Safety assigned to a judicial threats unit.
“You should be executed,” one message reads.
“Trust me when I say this,” reads another. “I will come for you. I don’t care. No one will stop me either.”
Last week, a state appeals court judge temporarily froze two silence orders that Judge Engoron had issued to protect his court’s staff from Trump’s abuse and from subsequent attacks that engulfed his office.
“The implementation of the limited silence orders resulted in a decrease in the number of threats, intimidation and disparaging messages the judge and his staff received,” Mr. Hollon wrote in the filing Wednesday.
“However, when Trump violated the silence orders, the number of threatening, intimidating and disparaging messages increased,” he added.
Trump’s false statements about Ms. Greenfield, which Judge Engoron ordered him to remove from Truth Social, “resulted in hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages,” Mr. Hollon’s statement said.
Her cell phone and email address were reportedly compromised, “resulting in daily doxing,” and she has since been subjected to “intimidating, derogatory comments and anti-Semitic tropes” on a daily basis.
She receives dozens of harassing phone calls, messages and emails on social media every day, half of which are anti-Semitic, Mr. Hollon said.
Attached to the file are several transcripts of the voicemail, including one left for Ms. Greenfield: “Jews like you. Fat ********** stupid **********. Fire the Twinkies, you *****. You are clearly a ***** and a child molester. You ********* pedophile*****. Anyway, listen. You look like ****. You’re ****** nasty. Ugly. Dirty. I bet your shit smells like a dump. Guaranteed. Either way, lose some weight. Be a little proud of yourself, you fat *****.”
These threats have created “an ongoing security risk to the judge, his staff and his family,” Hollon wrote.
Earlier this month, Judge Engoron shot down what he called “unconvincing” First Amendment arguments from Trump’s lawyers against his silence orders, noting the threat of political violence that has plagued the former president’s criminal and civil cases since his first indictment earlier this year.
“The threat and actual violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well documented,” Judge Engoron wrote.
He said his rooms 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 freed Trump and other parties in the lawsuit from disparaging members of the court.
Within the week of the gag order being suspended, Trump posted about clerk Allison Greenfield at least three times on his Truth Social account.
Moments after the joke was lifted on November 16, he called her a “politically biased and out of control Trump Hating Clerk, sinking him and his court to a new level of LOW.”
Two days later, he attacked the “cunning and highly partisan clerk, Allison Greenfield.”
“Regardless of what we say to show our TOTAL INNOCENCE, and it has been proven to many, many times over, this political, Trump Hating Judge, along with his horrible, seething with rage law secretary, with her illegal campaign contributions, will find me guilty” , he wrote on November 21.
A lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses the former president, his two adult sons and key business partners of grossly inflating his net worth and assets in financial statements provided to banks and lenders to receive favorable financing terms .
Judge Engoron has already found the defendants liable for fraud.
The trial, now in its eighth week, threatens to collapse his state real estate empire and could result in tens of millions of dollars in fines against the defendants.
Federal judges are also reviewing a silence order against Mr. Trump in a case surrounding his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
At a hearing Monday, a three-judge federal appeals court was skeptical of his legal team’s arguments to overturn a gag order that barred him from attacking witnesses and prosecutors in the criminal conspiracy case.
The justices appeared likely to limit the scope of the order, in an effort to balance First Amendment protections around political speech while addressing the wave of threats and intimidation made by Mr. Trump and his supporters has been unleashed against the prosecutors, judges, witnesses and potential jurors involved in the case. a growing number of cases against him.
A recent filing from US Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team describes this dynamic as “part of a pattern going back years in which people publicly targeted” by Trump have been subjected to intimidation , threats and intimidation.’
Mr. Trump “is seeking to use this known dynamic to his advantage,” the filing added, and “this case has continued unabated as this case and other unrelated cases involving the defendant have progressed.”