‘We’re in a dark space,’ US judge says on rising threats

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By Luc Cohen

MIAMI (Reuters) – Threats against U.S. judges are rising and lawyers should do more to push back against heated rhetoric, four federal judges said in a panel discussion on Thursday.

Speaking at an American Bar Association meeting on white collar crime in Miami, U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware of Las Vegas federal court said threats against the judiciary had gone up “exponentially.”  

“We’re in a dark space, and we have to stop pretending like we’re not in that space,” Boulware said to applause from the audience of mostly white collar defense lawyers. 

U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as tech billionaire Elon Musk and other allies of President Donald Trump ramp up efforts to discredit judges who stand in the way of White House efforts to slash federal jobs and programs, Reuters reported exclusively earlier this week, citing several judges with knowledge of the warnings.

Republican lawmakers also have moved to impeach judges who have ruled against Trump’s policies, though it would take a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove a judge from office – a likely insurmountable barrier. 

Among the judges targeted for impeachment are U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan, who in February blocked Musk’s team from accessing U.S. Treasury Department systems responsible for trillions of dollars in payments.

Engelmayer’s decision prompted a wave of social media criticism by Musk and other Trump allies. 

“It became the subject of high-level Twitter, X discussion to a point where he and his family started receiving really disturbing communications, some at the level of threatening,” another federal judge in Manhattan, Paul Oetken, told the audience. “That’s really troubling.”

Boulware said judges do not always disclose the threats they receive to lawyers in their cases, but that they were an “almost regular occurrence.” Neither he nor the other judges on the panel provided statistics on threats.

The judges said the proper method for lawyers who disagreed with their decisions was to appeal. They said lawyers’ questioning in public of judges’ motives undermined trust in the judiciary and contributed to the rise in threats.    

“We can handle criticism. It’s the type of criticism. If it’s done in a way that subjects us to harm, that’s problematic,” said Darrin Gayles, a federal judge in Miami. “The kinds of attacks from lawyers who should know better now, it adds fuel to the fire.”

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in Miami; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Daniel Wallis)