‘Hundreds of Threatening’ Voicemails Sent to Trump Judge Will Allow D.C. Court to ‘Quantify’ How Trump Fuels Harassment, Says Lisa Rubin

MSNBC guest host Ali Velshi spoke with legal experts on Monday to discuss how evidence of threats made against the judge and his staff in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial will now be used in Trump’s D.C. trial, as the gag order there is being appealed.

The former president is on trial in federal court in the nation’s capital over his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“Tell me about the connection for anyone who doesn’t sort of understand the legality of this, of Jack Smith using stuff that’s related to the New York civil fraud trial for his own trial?” Velshi asked legal analyst Andrew Weissmann to begin the segment.

“Sure. Well, you have two judges, one in a criminal case in D.C. and one in a civil case in New York, dealing with a similar issue, which is that Donald Trump is a defendant and he is speaking in ways that the government thinks and the court has agreed, the trial court has agreed, endangers the integrity of the judicial process. That judicial process can be a civil case, as in New York or a criminal case, as in DC,” Weissmann replied, adding:

Both of those so-called gag orders are on appeal and both are stayed pending appeal, meaning that they are not yet in effect pending the outcome of that appellate process. But the reason they relate to each other is the history of violence, a history of threats to witnesses, potential jurors, to court personnel, to prosecutors is relevant to both cases.

Velshi then ran through the “hundreds of threatening” voicemails and other messages that the judge and his law clerk in New York City have been receiving.

“The reason I bring this up is because this is not about witness interference and or court interference in the normal way. It’s this permission structure of harassment and intimidation and anti-Semitism,” Velshi noted.

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin responded, “And you can see that also in the affirmation from the court officer, because in addition to excerpting some of the most vile threats against the principal law clerk, which primarily have to do with her relationship with the judge and her religion, encoded in those are also threats against Letitia James as the New York attorney general that take on a very transparently racist nature.”

Rubin went on to discuss the nature of the threats, adding:

And also threats against the judge who himself is Jewish and therefore, those are anti-Semitic. And there’s also a suggestion of homophobia. It’s not just a suggestion. There’s more than a whiff of it. There’s some real homophobia in those threats, too. So when you talk about an environment of hate, it is sort of a cataclysm of isms, so to speak, in that affirmation.

I think the reason, though, going back to what the conversation you and Andrew were having, one of the reasons the special counsel wants to bring this to the DC circuit’s attention is because there was a suggestion during oral argument that there was no proof that anything Trump had said had led to particularly violent threats against anybody who was a subject of that gag order. Obviously, someone has been arrested for threatening Judge Tanya Chutkan, but she herself is not a subject of the gag order she issued that is now on appeal in D.C. by giving to the D.C. Circuit this affirmation from the court security officer in New York.

“You start to see evidence of what happens when Trump issues a threat both in kind and the extent of that. One of the things you didn’t mention about that information is that the court security officer says, I’ve transcribed the voicemails that have been left for Judge and Goren and his chambers and for the principal law clerk. They fill 275 single-spaced pages,” Rubin continued, adding:

So to give that information to the D.C. Circuit, I think is particularly valuable to show. There’s not just a correlation between, you know, a Trump post and an uptick in a threat environment, but you can actually quantify that. And excerpted and presented to a court in an evidentiary fashion.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.

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