TRUMP LAWYER IS OK WITH POLITICAL ASSASSINATION
My wife was Judge of Elections in Chester County Precinct 110 Coatesville for 10 years. I was an election officer.
She replaced the former judge of elections who was tired of harassment of voters by Saha supporter Bob Saucier.
Trump-inspired death threats are terrorizing election workers
Not only election officials & GOP politicians face Trump death threats. Media also face Trump death threats.
“The alarming rhetoric against the nation’s journalists, whom Trump has consistently and insidiously referred to as the “enemy of the people,” has also been echoed by his top allies, indicating the promises of revenge are not the rantings of a madman, but the actual intended course of action should the Republican presidential frontrunner manage to seize power again…
“All autocrats consider the free press their enemy, and use legal harassment, imprisonment, and other methods to silence journalists,” Ben-Ghiat told me.
“Trump, Patel, and others have already sued CNN and many other media outlets for defamation, and in doing so they are in line with authoritarians who use lawsuits to financially and psychologically exhaust journalists and media outlets.”
Ben-Ghiat added that such public threats “are also attempts to get media outlets to self-censor.” She stressed “autocratic media environments depend not only on the dissemination of talking points friendly to the leader, but also on silence about anything the autocrat does not want the public to know.”
CNN
Published 7:11 AM EST, Thu December 7, 2023
“In her paper, Kleinfeld notes a striking example of this effect at work — a comment by Kim Ward, the Trump-supporting Republican leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate, on what would happen if she spoke out against the former president.
“I’d get my house bombed tonight,” Ward said.
“The death threats aren’t just directed at politicians in Washington. Data has shown extraordinary levels of threats against mayors, federal judges, election administrators, public health officials, and even school board members. It’s hard to know how large the increase is for many of these local positions because no one has been keeping records for all that long. In the past, there was simply no need.
“It’s not even accurate to say [threatening election workers] was rare prior to 2020. It was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me in 2021. “This is beyond anything that we’ve ever seen.”
“Never before has it been more important for Republican officials to stand up for the integrity of the American electoral system. But they haven’t faced this level of threat in their political lives — in fact, no currently living elected official has.
“They say ‘it’s never been this bad before.’ Well, on the one hand, it has,” says Freeman, the Yale professor. “On the other hand ... I’m talking about the lead-up to the Civil War.”
"Then-Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican responsible for election oversight, became a lightning rod in 2020 when Trump singled him out by name in a tweet as someone who was “being used big time by the Fake News Media” as a cover for election fraud.
He received a wave of threats; a deputy commissioner, Seth Bluestein, was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. Schmidt’s wife got emails with threats such as “ALBERT RINO SCHMIDT WILL BE FATALLY SHOT” and “HEADS ON SPIKES. TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS.” The family left their home for safety reasons after the election, and Schmidt did not run for reelection in 2023 (he was recently appointed to serve as secretary of state under Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro)."
"Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican and the state’s highest ranking election official, described a vicious cycle. Experienced elections officials’ resignations left less experienced workers in charge.
“They’re more likely to make errors and make errors in an environment where everything is perceived as being intentional and malicious and seeking to change the outcome of the election,” he said.
Schmidt said the difficulty in retaining election workers and recruiting new ones is “one of the biggest challenges” in running elections."
FROM:
Pennsylvania Capital Star
State and local election workers quitting amid abuse, officials tell U.S. Senate panel
BY: JACOB FISCHLER - NOVEMBER 1, 2023 7:34 PM
“It’s time to do it,” Stone told Greco. “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.”
A source familiar with the discussion told Mediate they believed Stone’s remarks were serious. “It was definitely concerning that he was constantly planning violence with an NYPD officer and other militia groups,” the source said.
Both Nadler and Swalwell serve on the House Judiciary Committee. At the time of the Caffe Europa conversation, Nadler had announced the committee would be investigating then-President Donald Trump’s decision to commute Stone’s sentence after he was convicted of federal crimes in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
“A jury found Roger Stone guilty,” Nadler wrote on Twitter in July 2020. “By commuting his sentence, President Trump has infected our judicial system with partisanship and cronyism and attacked the rule of law. @House Judiciary will conduct an aggressive investigation into this brazen corruption.”
The source told Mediaite of Stone: “Stone had been at war with Nadler and Swalwell for years. He just hates them.”
“He just wanted to get Trump back into office so these things would stop,” the source added.
MORE AT:
MEDIAITE
Exclusive: Roger Stone Spoke With Cop Pal About Assassinating Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler
Diana Falzone Jan 8th, 2024, 3:39 pm
TRUMP LAWYER IS OK WITH POLITICAL ASSASSINATION.
”I asked you a yes or no question," the judge said. "Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?”
"If he were impeached and convicted first, and so — " Sauer began.
"So your answer is no," Pan said.
“Brave Republicans at all levels of government, from local officials like Richer to Sen. Mitt Romney (UT), have been warning us of the dangers going into 2024. They have seen the recent rise in right-wing political violence, most notably on January 6, and seen how comfortable Trump is with openly directing his supporters to hurt people.
“Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP,” writes Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Absent threats, Kleinfeld argues, a move to Trump from inside the party — perhaps a more serious challenge in the presidential primary — might have had a better chance of getting off the ground.
In her paper, Kleinfeld notes a striking example of this effect at work — a comment by Kim Ward, the Trump-supporting Republican leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate, on what would happen if she spoke out against the former president.
“I’d get my house bombed tonight,” Ward said.
Our politics have gotten more violent
Bob Inglis, a South Carolina Congressman for 12 years who left office in 2011, remembers getting in some fairly bitter brawls with his Democratic rivals. In his later years as a Congress member, after making a more moderate turn, he recalled receiving some real vitriol from the base — even facing a crowd in his hometown that seemed so volatile that he refused to introduce his family on stage.
But that was the exception, not the rule.
“Now,” Inglis says, “members of Congress face that [level of hostility] routinely…”
Members of Congress are taking these threats seriously. In September, three journalists at the Washington Post reviewed FEC filings to assess how much candidates for the House and Senate were spending on security. They found an overall increase of 500 percent between 2020 and 2022.
*The death threats aren’t just directed at politicians in Washington. Data has shown extraordinary levels of threats against mayors, federal judges, election administrators, public health officials, and even school board members. It’s hard to know how large the increase is for many of these local positions because no one has been keeping records for all that long. In the past, there was simply no need.
“It’s not even accurate to say [threatening election workers] was rare prior to 2020. It was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me in 2021. “This is beyond anything that we’ve ever seen.”
While this level of threat is unfamiliar in modern America, political violence is far from unprecedented in the long arc of the country’s history. We’ve seen a civil war, the assassinations of multiple presidents, and a senator beaten unconscious on the Senate floor
“American politics has always been violent. The question is how violent,” says Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale and author of a book on violence in Congress before the Civil War.
Freeman and other scholars see rising political violence as a reflection of deeper political tensions. Research suggests it tends to be perpetrated by angry, aggressive people with poor impulse control. Systematic increases in violent threats would thus happen at moments of heightened political emotion — meaning those times when the stakes of politics seem especially high and personal.
That’s clearly the case now…
The former president’s rhetoric has often directly encouraged violence. At a 2016 rally in Iowa, Trump instructed his supporters to “knock the crap out of” disruptive protesters. “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees,” he added. During the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder, Trump implied that any rioters should be shot by tweeting an old white supremacist slogan: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
And, at the fateful rally on January 6, 2021, he told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That day, and ones immediately to follow, dramatize just how profoundly threats of violence have come to shape Republican politics.
How the threat of violence cemented Trump’s control over the GOP when it looked most vulnerable
On January 6, a crowd chanting “hang Mike Pence” rampaged through the Capitol’s halls. Members of Congress on both sides legitimately feared for their lives, leading many Republicans to privately support Democrats’ impeachment push afterward. Trump, they believe, needed to be held accountable for what they had been through.
But the fear of physical harm, of someone killing them or their families, held some of these Republicans back from voting to impeach him. The threat even became a tool of peer pressure — Republicans citing the danger of speaking out to keep each other in line. Sen. Romney recounted stories to this effect to the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins:
When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
Romney personally refused to bow to this intimidation and voted to impeach, just as he did during Trump’s first impeachment. But not every Republican displayed this level of bravery in the face of serious threats to both their political and personal future.
Just before the House vote on impeachment, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) has said he heard firsthand from Republicans that fear was holding at least two of them back.
“I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment,” he said in an MSNBC appearance.
Former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) recalls one of his House colleagues privately condemning Trump’s claims of election fraud, but voting to overturn the election results on the evening of January 6 — just hours after the assault.
“My colleague feared for family members, and the danger the vote would put them in,” Meijer wrote in a Detroit News op-ed. This fear wasn’t idle: After voting to impeach Trump, Meijer himself faced so many threats that felt the need to purchase body armor.
And reporters confirmed these accounts.
“I know for a fact several members *want* to impeach but fear casting that vote could get them or their families murdered,” journalist Tim Alberta tweeted before the House impeachment vote.
While the January 6 riot failed to crown Trump president, it had a clear and undeniable secondary effect: intimidating Republicans who might otherwise have voted to impeach him. Absent these threats, it’s possible that Republicans like Romney could have mustered up additional GOP votes in the Senate to convict Trump.
If these threats could so powerfully shape the behavior of some of America’s wealthiest and most powerful legislators, how much might they affect state and local officials with far fewer resources?…
In recent years, far-right killers have been responsible for the largest mass murders of Jews and Latinos in American history and the only riot ever to breach the US Capitol…Romney recalls feeling this kind of fear when he went to Utah after the Trump impeachment fight. Facing crowds full of Mormon Republicans who had long been his base, he received such a hostile reaction that he was beginning to fear for his life. “It only takes one really disturbed person,” he told Coppins, adding that he began paying $5,000 a day out of pocket for personal security.
The special impact of right-on-right violent threats isn’t just about means and opportunity; it’s also about motive.
Broadly speaking, Democrats have safety in numbers from the far right: Because the party in general opposes Trump and Trumpism, individual members’ anti-Trump positioning is less likely to attract ire from his supporters. By contrast, individual Republicans who dissent from the Trumpist line immediately get singled out in conservative and far-right media — attracting the sort of attention reserved for a handful of “most hated” Democrats such as Reps. Nancy Pelosi (CA) or Ilhan Omar (MN).
For all these reasons, threats of violence are likely to be uniquely effective on Republicans when issued from their own base. The threats work, more than anything else, to discipline elected Republicans — to force them to toe whatever line the Trumpists want them to walk, or else.
That said, the power of this disciplining effect will likely vary from case to case. During October’s battle to decide the next speaker of the House, supporters of the Trumpy Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) directed a large number of death threats at House Republicans who refused to vote for him. But this time, the wavering Republicans refused to cave — even citing the threats as a reason for opposing Jordan, who was ultimately forced out of the race.
But we have no reason to believe the threat of violence has lost its disciplining power entirely.
For one, the danger simply hasn’t gone away: Data on threats to local officials released in September, from Civic Pulse and Princeton’s Bridging Divides Institute, shows that the level of threat has remained constant over the past year.
“The threat against [Trump-skeptical Republicans] is real and continuing,” writes the Council on Foreign Relations’ Jacob Ware. “Trump today retains an overwhelming power to deploy vitriol and violence against his political rivals.”
For another, the Jordan speakership fight was missing several crucial features that make threats appear more serious. Unlike the 2020 election, which forced Republicans in the House and Senate to pick between siding with Trump or the Democrats, this was an internal fight between conservative Republicans. And it’s one where Trump’s personal future wasn’t directly at stake — unlike, say, this year’s election.
Threats and the 2024 election
As Trump returned to the campaign trail in 2023, he became increasingly willing to employ naked authoritarian rhetoric and physical threats.
He encouraged people to “go after” New York Attorney General Leticia James, suggested shoplifters should be shot, and intimated that former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley deserves to be executed. Perhaps most ominously, he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
According to Kleinfeld, people around the world are substantially more likely to engage in political violence when they feel like they have permission from their political representatives to do it. It’s a major part of the reason why, in the US data she’s examined, incidents of threats and actual violence are “three to five times higher” on the political right today than on the left.
This cannot be lost on Republican officials, and their behavior in the past few years suggests it in fact isn’t. The lockstep support for Trump even after four indictments, indicates they remain disciplined by the former president’s power — both electoral and physical. The lessons of January 6 and its aftermath have been fully internalized.
And we’re now entering an election season that’s especially likely to raise the threat level.
During the last presidential election cycle, threats against public officials tended to rise at pivotal moments in the campaign calendar. Threats against local election officials peaked around the November 2020 election itself, while threats against members of Congress (of course) spiked in the days around January 6. Thankfully, none were killed during either of those periods — but not for lack of trying.
Then-Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican responsible for election oversight, became a lightning rod in 2020 when Trump singled him out by name in a tweet as someone who was “being used big time by the Fake News Media” as a cover for election fraud.
He received a wave of threats; a deputy commissioner, Seth Bluestein, was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. Schmidt’s wife got emails with threats such as “ALBERT RINO SCHMIDT WILL BE FATALLY SHOT” and “HEADS ON SPIKES. TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS.” The family left their home for safety reasons after the election, and Schmidt did not run for reelection in 2023 (he was recently appointed to serve as secretary of state under Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro).
The 2024 election promises to be every bit as contentious. If anything, Trump’s ongoing legal woes make the stakes even higher — both for him and his movement. His rhetoric is already escalating, his followers at even higher alert for signs of betrayal from the “RINOs” in the “Republican establishment.”
Never before has it been more important for Republican officials to stand up for the integrity of the American electoral system. But they haven’t faced this level of threat in their political lives — in fact, no currently living elected official has.
“They say ‘it’s never been this bad before.’ Well, on the one hand, it has,” says Freeman, the Yale professor. “On the other hand ... I’m talking about the lead-up to the Civil War.”
Ben Jacobs contributed reporting to this piece.
MORE AT:
Vox
How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump
The insidious way violence is changing American politics — and shaping the 2024 election.
Zack Beauchamp Jan 2, 2024, 7:00am EST
It takes a while for the criminal justice system to catch up to political violence.
“SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — One of three defendants has pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with a series of drive-by shootings at the homes of state and local lawmakers in Albuquerque after the 2022 election, according to federal court filings made public Tuesday.
Jose Louise Trujillo pleaded guilty at a Monday hearing to charges of conspiracy, election interference, illegal use of a firearm and fentanyl possession with the intent to distribute. Federal and local prosecutors allege that the attacks were orchestrated by former Republican candidate Solomon Peña with the involvement of a third man. Peña maintains his innocence.
The attacks on the homes of four Democratic officials, including the current state House speaker, took place in December 2022 and January 2023 amid a surge of threats and acts of intimidation against election workers and public officials across the country after former President Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Courthouse News’ podcast Sidebar tackles the stories you need to know from the legal world. Join our hosts as they take you in and out of courtrooms in the U.S. and beyond.
Trujillo is due to be sentenced in April. His attorney, John Anderson, declined to comment on the plea agreement beyond what is in the court records, and the U.S. attorney's office had no immediate comment.
Alexander Uballez, the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, has said the shootings targeted the homes of two county commissioners shortly after and because of their certification of the 2022 election. No one was injured, but in one case bullets passed through the bedroom of a state senator’s 10-year-old daughter.
Peña has been held without bail since his January 2023 arrest.
Demetrio Trujillo, Jose's father, also faces federal charges alleging that he and and his son helped Peña obtain vehicles and firearms and that they also fired on victims' homes.
Jose Trujillo was arrested in January on an outstanding warrant. According to authorities, in his car with him he had more than 800 fentanyl pills and two firearms, leading to a break in the investigation as officers traced at least one gun to bullet casings found at one of the shootings.”
FROM:
COURTHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
New Mexico man pleads guilty in drive-by shootings on homes of Democratic lawmakers
Following the shootings, New Mexico state lawmakers enacted legislation that provides felony sanctions for intimidation of election regulators.
ASSOCIATED PRESS / January 9, 2024
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